Cool, now can we get a cheaper plan that just plays music?
Sorry, best we can do is make a new tier at the same price that only plays music, while we jack up the price of the new Premium Plan to account for ‘rising market costs’!
rising market costs
= “paying right wingers like Joe Rogan to shit out podcasts on our service”
Like him or not, he’s like the most popular journalist in the world now or something.
Is JRE considered news? This is not a bad faith question, I just never thought it was news
He’s an entertainer.
I’d say he falls into the radio/podcast talk show host category.
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Some people can’t talk to people unless they know what they are subscribed to politically.
To be fair spotify bleads money, because the big music labels are sucking most of the money out of spotify.
Podcasts and stuff are their way of trying to get out of that uncomfortable situation, because they own the rights of the stuff produced via their platform.
Perhaps as likely as YouTube Premium separating music access from no ads on videos… I wish. It keeps me locked in.
They had that YouTube Premium Lite tier in a few regions, which was basically that. But Google just killed it.
Hard to beat $10 for unlimited music and podcasts + soon to be audiobooks
The audiobooks is very limited though. Just 15 hours per month (many books are longer than that) and in the case of duo and family plans, only the master account gets audiobooks.
That’s interesting I didn’t know it was limited to the main account. I’m a big audiobook listener, and the idea of being able to listen to something but then move on to something else is appealing. I pay for one credit on Audible every month but I have a lot of books, that after getting into them for a couple hours I realize they’re not really for me. That’s a lot of wasted money.  I wonder if the Spotify is going to give you the option to buy the book? 
You can apparently buy an 10 hour extension if your hours run out.
Depending on how expensive that is, it might still be worth it.
But this is not released yet, right? I went and picked a couple audiobooks to listen them to them, but it comes back that I have to go into Spotify on the web and buy them and when I go there, I literally have to buy them there’s no listening to X hours, etc. 
Truly the only subscription I’m happy to pay.
£3 a month if you’re on a family plan!
It’s understandable why they are doing this. Apparently the company has never ever made any profits, and since the main 3 record labels are demanding 70% of the revenue from Spotify, they can’t do anything to change that revenue split to 50-50 instead as an example.
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The GitHub seems to only be for a downloader app that distributes unverified APKs that don’t currently do anything. Removing this thread as a precaution - particularly given recent news of malicious modded APKs.
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Usually they’re integrated with server side purchases so an APK hack wouldn’t work with audiobooks. You’d have to use some sort of pirate client that I’m not aware of and may not exist. Good app idea though to pirate audiobooks from torrents to your phone. Kind of like popcorn time.
15 hours per month… just use Libby and a library card and get unlimited audiobooks for free.
https://libro.fm is a an interesting alternative to audible if you can pay.
No DRM and if your local bookshop registered themselves a percentage of what you buy is paid to them.
Huh… I mostly listen to Warhammer audiobooks. They have 4 random ones, all of them in German. >.>
Aww that’s unlucky. I mostly listen to popular sf/fantasy books and always found them.
Which sounds fine in theory until you realize they only have a very limited selection of a specific genre you’re looking for.
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"To start, we’re offering each Premium individual, as well as plan managers for Family and Duo accounts, 15 hours of listening per month—giving them the ability to enjoy as many titles as they want within that monthly allocation.
[…]
For those super audiophiles who use up their 15 hours before their monthly billing cycles refresh, you can purchase a 10-hour top-up to finish that series. Not sure how many hours you have left? Check it at any time in your in-app settings. "
No cost listed on how much the top-ups are.
Thought this was an interesting addition, but I see they figured out a way to ruin it from the start.
I don’t know if they have these, but for the purpose of clarity it doesn’t matter.
The Martian is 11 hours.
The Color of Magic is 7 hours.That’s two audio books that together surpassed their joke of a monthly allotment. Two.
And I’m going to burn a whole bunch of those hours falling asleep while the audio still plays.
We’re friends now because you listed Color of Magic.
Or if its something like Lord of the Rings or Eragon its about a third of a book.
How many Audio books do you listen to a month?
Not who you asked but I drive and work outside all day for work and listened to 18 books last month.
Ya, only offering 15 hrs means I won’t even look into this.
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I’d really love an audio book service like Netflix but 15 hours is a joke, that is 2 days worth of listening for me personally and a lot of books you wouldn’t be able to finish in that time.
I’ve tried the majority of the audio books services out there and they are all a load of shit, I think I’ll stick to piracy at this point, at least then I can keep the books I enjoy too to come back to again.
That’s barely a quarter of Sanderson book…
fuck that.
Literally listening to White Sand right now :D love Sanderson!
Use Libby, with your library card. Unlimited audiobooks and works for almost any library.
No, no it doesn’t. For a start I am not in the US so it isn’t Libby and secondly I tried the library card / app route and the selection is woefully shite.
It doesn’t even have what would be the most popular books for example say Lord of the Rings. It has a seemingly random selection. On top of that they have minimal licenses for the books so if you do manage to find something interesting you want to listen to someone may have already “rented it out” via the app and so you’d have to wait for them to “return” it before you can listen.
Library cards and apps (at least where I am) are one of the poorest choices available and that is saying something going up against the utter dogshit that is audible.
Libro.FM is DRM free and lets you buy any book once a month for a fixed cost.
Yeah I checked it out, it is basically audibles business model with the whole 1 credit a month thing. Yes, DRM free is great but I average 7-8 hours of listening a day so one book doesn’t last very long at all.
Thanks for sharing! I do think audiobooks are a much better fit than trying to make podcasts exclusive and paywalled.
Great. More garbage I don’t want shoved in my face.
I’m getting real tired of modern day UX in apps.
Spotify is and will always remain a music streaming app for me. I spend way more time listening to podcasts instead of music, but I don’t do that in Spotify.
People on here are acting like Spotify raises their price every two weeks like Netflix or something. This is an added feature that will likely not raise the costs to the user as it is intended to reduce the part of revenue they give to music labels (i.e. this helps keep the price you pay the same because they can’t make a profit, so the alternative is higher prices)
you mean something like this https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-07-24/adjusting-our-spotify-premium-prices/ ?
Yeah, their first price hike in something like 10 years and it’s a 1$ raise, which is less than inflation.
It’s their second hike. They raised it $1 in 2021, then again in 2023.
technically you’re correct, but this depends on the country and/or plan. For example family plan in europe is increased by 3 EUR
I understand why the family plan got raised by 3EUR as it has 6 users total, so a 0.50€ per user raise. Though I understand this is a bigger increase, it is kind of like cell operators in Canada, they give you 40GB for 50$ instead of like 5GB for 10$, the plans are artificially more expensive even though per GB Its cheaper
15 hours is pathetic lol. Need to hurry up and move my music library off of Spotify
“As many titles as they want”
Sooo… around one and a half standard length audio books a month, from a category probably filled with garbage romance novels and cheap sci fi. Be still my beating heart…
New feature isn’t good.
Agreed
Stop using old features
What?
It’s now one of my more expensive monthly subscriptions since I have the family plan, and they don’t offer a way to pay for a year to save overall last time I checked. I’m just not as impressed as I used to be considering the price rose as well
Podcasts in the app are terrible but this is something if actually consider switching to Spotify for
For the 15 hours a month allocation of audiobook time…?
Yes. Especially if I don’t have to work with virtual book checkouts and return deadlines
It’s moreso how they make audiobooks and podcasts a little subheading on the library page instead of being able to just switch over to full podcast and audiobook browsing.
I absolutely love that they’re skip song button is a 30 second jump on podcasts, makes the car journey so easy.
I used to use Youtube for podcasts but it isn’t good at skimming through bits without opening your phone and doesn’t integrate with Android auto at all.
Dang nothing in Canada yet it looks like
No, Canada only gets the bad streaming changes first, like password sharing crackdowns and price hikes lmfao
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I saw it pop up on mine, haven’t tried it yet though
I’m only seeing them available for purchase.
I sense a price increase coming…
Absolutely. It’s limited to 15 hours a month at the moment. Has price increase written all over it.
helpful I guess. I was excited when Spotify started to sell audiobooks but the pricing was just rediculous
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I have the family account but I’m not the one who will use this. Hopefully it’s not a pain to switch who can claim this because currently it’s limited to the main account holder.
I’ve been running modified Spotify IPAs and desktop scripts for years to get around paying premium; here’s to hoping that I can still play these audiobooks!
