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Remember what Spotify did to the music industry? Books are next
Why Spotify’s new audiobook offering is bad news for the future of publishing.
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Content creators continue to lose at the hands of distributors and platforms, says the writer.
PHOTO: AFP
Kim Scott
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Spotify may have made it easier than ever for us to listen to an enormous trove of music, but it extracted so much money in doing so that it impoverished musicians. Now the company is turning its attention to books with a new offering. It will do the same thing to writers, whose audiobooks Spotify has begun streaming in a new and more damaging way.
We have read this story before. Tech platforms and their algorithms have a tendency to reward high-performing creators – the more users they get, the more likely they are to attract more. In Spotify’s case, that meant that in 2020, 90 per cent of the royalties it paid out went to the top 0.8 per cent of artists, according to an analysis by Rolling Stone.
