Oh Spotify, when will you stop trying to push people to the high seas 🏴☠️
You can opt out of audiobooks and save the extra cost they added the other month. https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2024/05/spotify-saving-basic-plan-audiobooks/?source=CRM-MSETIP-84b484ca1c047788624
Thanks! I didn’t know about this. I never use audiobooks. Just changed my family plan. £2 is £2!
oooh, ty
Not in the US unfortunately, which is bullshit
Dang :/ I was looking for the option
slams
Destroys even!
“a single user says…”
The daily dot is a fucking joke.
Regardless, 15 hours audio is low AF
Audiobooks are expensive to produce and have extra licensing associated with them. Even Amazon can only give out 1 credit for $15 a month. A single books costs anywhere between $10-$60 bucks. Its just unreasonable to expect spotify to be able to afford that when they already barely pay musicians.
They could certainly “clearly pass the cost” of this on to the user by not offering Audiobooks to users who didn’t pay for the “+ # of Audiobooks” tier of Spotify Premium; instead of this horrible enshittified crap where it cuts you off midsentence like a greedy telecomm provider would. Or perhaps their limitation should be on how many titles you can listen to concurrently in a certain time period. (So if you open X books; that’s it; you have to shelve one or wait it out)
It certainly means that Spotify did a bad job at negotiating their rights to these audiobooks as well. That matters too; because that makes the product worse; and that should never have been allowed to happen. If they couldn’t have offered it nicely, they could’ve just not offered it at all or added it to a higher service tier so that the cost is diverted better.
Its just unreasonable to expect spotify to be able to afford that when they already barely pay musicians.
The audiobooks help them pay even less for music:
With the introduction of the stand-alone audiobooks offering, Spotify is now able to pay lower music-licensing rates for the music-and-audiobook bundle, introduced in the U.S. in November 2023. The 2022 settlement agreement between the National Music Publishers Assn. and streaming services includes a carveout for bundles (such as Amazon Prime and Apple Music + Apple News), which the new audiobook offering falls under. Such plans lower the mechanical licensing rates the company pays in the U.S. Spotify’s lower royalty rates are retroactive to March 1, 2024.
However, NMPA president-CEO David Israelite had strong words for the move when contacted for comment by Variety. “It appears Spotify has returned to attacking the very songwriters who make its business possible,” he wrote. “Spotify’s attempt to radically reduce songwriter payments by reclassifying their music service as an audiobook bundle is a cynical, and potentially unlawful, move that ends our period of relative peace. We will not stand for their perversion of the settlement we agreed upon in 2022 and are looking at all options.” The NMPA and streaming services resolved a years-long standoff over royalty rates with a Copyright Royalty Board ruling in 2022, and agreed upon a new rate of 15.35% for the 2023-2027 period.
I should have used the words “want to” instead of “be able to”. It is a garbage company I am definitely not defending their business practices.
Barely paying musicians is a choice. In fact even the whole audiobook setup is a choice. Give me the epub and TTS and I’d be happy as Larry.
I’m not defending them, just saying that it’s foolish for an enduser to expect anything different when they already don’t pay musicians and that is the primary content on their platform.
I can pretty much guarantee the average user would complain way more about the quality of simple TTS than they would the time limit. It would likely be a much bigger PR issue for them. AI generated TTS would probably be good enough for most but that is just another cost.
Regardless, the licensing involved with book publishers wouldn’t allow them to just produce their own audiobooks like that. So it is not really as simple as “just a choice”.
So, is this the type of SLAM you’d typically see in a moshpit? Or are we talking about wrestling slams?
I think it’s more like a door slam without a door.
I’m voting poetry
Oh Spotify, when will you stop trying to push people to the high seas
Spotify is worse than piracy. It’s a robber baron.
I’m about 2/3 of the way through backing up my ‘Liked’ songs to MP3 files, at which point I’m ending my sub.
It’s a bummer because I actually really like Spotify’s algorithm and it suggests great music for my tastes, but, I can have that for free without feeding their stupid insatiable greed.
Pro tip: get audiobooks from your library…along with paper books, ebooks, games, movies, etc.
The real story’s in the comments. This helped my single-mother-friend stay sane in the early/poorest years. Everyone needs to know how their library has changed since they last borrowed a book in 1982. Thanks for posting this – I forgot too!
Headline contains -
Opinion of random member of the public
The word “slams”
I’m not reading it because I’ve probably wiped better journalism off my arse this morning
Poster slams poop off his butthole, sparks controversy!
What a crock of shit!
There’s no need of “slam” – or “eye,” “mull,” “Solons,” usw – in an era where you’re not writing a 1-42-4.
(1 column, 42pt, four lines)
Fedi Punter in Media Lingo Rant Slam: Reaction
I’m fuckin raging. HERE’S WHY
Ten pictures of Feddit users reacting to clickbait headlines that will make you say “no, these are all trains. No, I’m complaining as such, I like trains, I just… I thought… No, the headline said something about… reactions, yeah, and ins- actually, hang on, how did you get in here?”
I hate the word “slams”
Audiobooks are expensive to produce.
Spotify is awful when it comes to content creators, complaining as an end user is crazy though.
If you read the article, the main point was that Spotify doesn’t inform about the limits clearly. Not the pricing.
Even now Spotify site says: “Spotify Premium: Listen without limits”. Clearly there is a limit, but the limits are only mentioned after the first subscription button if you scroll far enough.
If I could afford a lawyer I would use for lying
Audio books are no longer expensive to produce. I bet my ass most except for the biggest titles will be AI generated in very short time. Whether people like it or not.
Well unlike your ass, I appreciate the nuance of a good performance. But i know what you mean.
GPU time, while cheaper than a voice actor, is still a bit spendy though. And you then you also have the various copyright/licensing “issues” associated with AI content, companies may be a bit hesitant to go all in on producing books like that. Makes more sense for someone like Amazon/Audible and less sense for someone like spotify.
Besides, most audio books exist already so that really only applies to newer titles.
My ass probably could appreciate real performance if I was into audiobooks overall, I just like books as books. I’m not exactly happy about all content being replaced with AI slop. However I don’t think spotify cares, if something is cheaper they will go for it, just like other corpos.
Oh well I think they will be losing as well, people don’t even really need the audio book providers anymore, since they could just do AI ebooks themselves if they just have the text ebook.
Agreed on pretty much all counts but I love Audiobooks just as much as “analog” books lol
“the 15 hours customers get free with premium equates to two audiobooks” Is the average audiobook really that short!
For eragon it would takes months to finish.
The hobbit is 10 hours.
Think most of the books I’ve listened to have been over that length, but I don’t use Spotify. Self hosting for the win. No time limits in prologue
They probably have a bunch of 1 hour ‘books’ that mess with the average as shorter is cheaper to help pad out their numbers.
Looking at my personal library, the median length audiobook is The Last Wish at a tad over 10 hours. So it’d be equal to 1.5 books going by that, not the worst marketing exaggeration I’ve ever seen.
