In-app purchases are part of a freemium model for monetizing mobile applications or content. Consumers making purchases through an application do not have to visit a separate website to conduct. If you go through the Spotify website and click purchase premium you will be able to log in and purchase it. Then when you enter the app you will have premium.
Oh, Spotify. It grants us free access to our favorite music and podcasts, but sometimes finding the stuff we want can be tricky. For example, where are the best audiobooks on Spotify?
Because audiobooks don’t have their own genre on Spotify, finding one can feel like going to a garage sale and rummaging around, trying to find the books, and then, when you find a box of books, turning it upside down, trying to find one you like. In short, it’s a pain. But no worries! I’m here to tell you how (and where) to find free audiobooks on Spotify.
I’m going to do this in a couple of steps:
First, I am going to tell you where to find audiobooks on Spotify.
Then—because listening to an audiobook on Spotify is not as easy as, say, downloading an Audiobook from audible, or popping an old-school Book on Tape into your car stereo (I am old, guys)—I am going to explain how to actually listen to them.
Then I’ll give you a few recommendations.
One last note before the tutorial begins: all of my screenshots are from the free desktop version of Spotify. Why? Well, because the free version of the Spotify app doesn’t let you choose and listen to specific tracks on your phone. Instead it shuffles the tracks on a playlist or album. This is okay with music, but utterly impossible when you want to listen to a book from start to finish. (I assume that if you’re looking for free audiobooks on Spotify, you’re also using the free version of the app.)
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Okay. Let’s get started.
Where to find an audiobook on Spotify
Start with a basic search
I find that the best place to start searching for audiobooks is in the playlists. So go ahead and type “audiobooks” into the search bar on the top of your Spotify screen.
I know the top result looks promising, but scroll down to the bottom of the search results, under the “songs.”
You’ll see right away, from the Top Result, that Spotify has its own Audiobooks playlist. It’s fine, but not terribly helpful if you have something specific in mind. It’s just kind of a big list of audiobooks. Chapter 1 from an unmarked Kafka book is thrown right in there with Alice in Wonderland.
So what I want you to do is scroll down the page, past the top result and past the “Songs” until you see “Artists” and “Albums” and “Playlists.” This is where the real search results are.
This is the bottom of the search result page, and it’s the part of the page you want to be on.
Check out the playlists
Let’s start with the playlists. Click “See All” to browse them.
There are a lot of audiobook playlists, many of which are maintained by individuals who have very specific tastes (Audiobooks in the Queen’s English, for example). These users have already gone through the trouble of curating audiobooks for you, so you may find stuff you like right there. If not, scroll though and find some that are similar what you’re looking for. See who posted them, or who the artist is. Click on the artist. Chances are, they will have more audiobooks on their own page.
This is how you find audiobook “artists” using a playlist.
Check out the artists
Audiobook “artists” on Spotify are a varied bunch.
Does Spotify Have Music Videos
Some audiobook narrators have artist pages. Some artists are simply sites that post a lot of audiobooks. And then there are actual author names used as artists—H.G. Wells, for example, or Virginia Woolf—the nice thing about artist pages for authors is that all of their audiobooks are listed on those pages, and also that other author pages are suggested in the sidebar. So, if you’re a fan of Jules Verne, Spotify might suggest that you also check out Arthur Conan Doyle.
Like Vonnegut? Look, his friends HG Wells and Aldous Huxley are on Spotify, too!
This method is by no means foolproof. Not all your favorite authors have artist pages, or if they do, there are only a few books up. And sometimes, because these audiobooks are uploaded by individuals and not publishers, they’re not in English. I got excited to see Terry Pratchett listed as an artist, but all of his audiobooks were in German. As were Neil Gaiman’s.
Also, as with free ebooks, you will have to wade through a lot of public domain novels. Expect to see a metric buttload of H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft. But you’ll also find some unexpected treasure troves (see below for a couple suggestions).
How to listen to an audiobook on Spotify
Okay. So you’ve found a playlist you like, and an audiobook you like. But all the playlists pretty much list just the first chapter of every audiobook. How do you listen to a whole book?
Come with me. I will show you.
Find the audiobook you like. Then look to the right of the title. You will see three little dots.
Just hover over the track listing with your cursor and the dots will appear.
Click on the dots. A menu will pop up. You want to find Go to Album. Click on that and it will take you to the full audiobook, which is technically an album on Spotify.
Then you can listen to the whole thing, in order!
Some good places to find Audiobooks on Spotify
In the course of researching this piece, I found some intriguing audiobook sources. Here are some of my favorites, but look around on your own, and you’re certain to find something that appeals to you.
Audiobooks: I really like the Audiobooks artist page, which maintains playlists of audiobooks by genre. And when I say genre, I mean everything. The playlists there range from nonfiction about wellness to new books to best sellers to children’s books. It also includes a short audio track, describing the process of finding and listening to full audiobooks, in case my explanation above made no sense.
Doctor Who: If you’re a Whovian, you are in luck! Doctor Who’s artist page has a several playlists of Doctor Who audiobooks.
DBS Audiobooks and Wordscape: Some profiles are sources for lots of classic audiobooks. Think Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and other old works. If you like classics, it’s definitely worth poking around on these two pages.
Various Authors: Various Authors is, hilariously, the name of an artist page. I’m recommending it because they release various collections of short stories from different genres, written by, well, various authors. So if you’ve just got a short amount of time, or you’re listening on the free mobile app and are stuck with shuffle, you can listen to a short story at a time.
Spotify’s Women’s History playlists: Last year, Spotify complied playlists of books, stories and poetry for Women’s History Month. Those are still there! Check them out!
Happy listening! And hit the comments if you have any other questions about audiobooks on Spotify!
We believe that technology achieves its true potential when we infuse it with human creativity and ingenuity. From our earliest days, we’ve built our devices, software and services to help artists, musicians, creators and visionaries do what they do best.
Sixteen years ago, we launched the iTunes Store with the idea that there should be a trusted place where users discover and purchase great music and every creator is treated fairly. The result revolutionized the music industry, and our love of music and the people who make it are deeply engrained in Apple.
Eleven years ago, the App Store brought that same passion for creativity to mobile apps. In the decade since, the App Store has helped create many millions of jobs, generated more than $120 billion for developers and created new industries through businesses started and grown entirely in the App Store ecosystem.
At its core, the App Store is a safe, secure platform where users can have faith in the apps they discover and the transactions they make. And developers, from first-time engineers to larger companies, can rest assured that everyone is playing by the same set of rules.
That’s how it should be. We want more app businesses to thrive — including the ones that compete with some aspect of our business, because they drive us to be better.
What Spotify is demanding is something very different. After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem — including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers — without making any contributions to that marketplace. At the same time, they distribute the music you love while making ever-smaller contributions to the artists, musicians and songwriters who create it — even going so far as to take these creators to court.
Spotify has every right to determine their own business model, but we feel an obligation to respond when Spotify wraps its financial motivations in misleading rhetoric about who we are, what we’ve built and what we do to support independent developers, musicians, songwriters and creators of all stripes.
Spotify claims we’re blocking their access to products and updates to their app.
Let’s clear this one up right away. We’ve approved and distributed nearly 200 app updates on Spotify’s behalf, resulting in over 300 million downloaded copies of the Spotify app. The only time we have requested adjustments is when Spotify has tried to sidestep the same rules that every other app follows.
We’ve worked with Spotify frequently to help them bring their service to more devices and platforms:
When we reached out to Spotify about Siri and AirPlay 2 support on several occasions, they’ve told us they’re working on it, and we stand ready to help them where we can.
Spotify is deeply integrated into platforms like CarPlay, and they have access to the same app development tools and resources that any other developer has.
We found Spotify’s claims about Apple Watch especially surprising. When Spotify submitted their Apple Watch app in September 2018, we reviewed and approved it with the same process and speed with which we would any other app. In fact, the Spotify Watch app is currently the No. 1 app in the Watch Music category.
Spotify is free to build apps for — and compete on — our products and platforms, and we hope they do.
Spotify wants all the benefits of a free app without being free.
A full 84 percent of the apps in the App Store pay nothing to Apple when you download or use the app. That’s not discrimination, as Spotify claims; it’s by design:
Apps that are free to you aren’t charged by Apple.
Apps that earn revenue exclusively through advertising — like some of your favorite free games — aren’t charged by Apple.
App business transactions where users sign up or purchase digital goods outside the app aren’t charged by Apple.
Apps that sell physical goods — including ride-hailing and food delivery services, to name a few — aren’t charged by Apple.
The only contribution that Apple requires is for digital goods and services that are purchased inside the app using our secure in-app purchase system. As Spotify points out, that revenue share is 30 percent for the first year of an annual subscription — but they left out that it drops to 15 percent in the years after.
That’s not the only information Spotify left out about how their business works:
The majority of customers use their free, ad-supported product, which makes no contribution to the App Store.
A significant portion of Spotify’s customers come through partnerships with mobile carriers. This generates no App Store contribution, but requires Spotify to pay a similar distribution fee to retailers and carriers.
Even now, only a tiny fraction of their subscriptions fall under Apple’s revenue-sharing model. Spotify is asking for that number to be zero.
Let’s be clear about what that means. Apple connects Spotify to our users. We provide the platform by which users download and update their app. We share critical software development tools to support Spotify’s app building. And we built a secure payment system — no small undertaking — which allows users to have faith in in-app transactions. Spotify is asking to keep all those benefits while also retaining 100 percent of the revenue.
Spotify wouldn’t be the business they are today without the App Store ecosystem, but now they’re leveraging their scale to avoid contributing to maintaining that ecosystem for the next generation of app entrepreneurs. We think that’s wrong.
What does that have to do with music? A lot.
We share Spotify’s love of music and their vision of sharing it with the world. Where we differ is how you achieve that goal.Underneath the rhetoric, Spotify’s aim is to makemore money off others’ work. And it’s not just the App Store that they’re trying to squeeze — it’s also artists, musicians and songwriters.
Just this week, Spotify sued music creators after a decision by the US Copyright Royalty Board required Spotify to increase its royalty payments. This isn’t just wrong, it represents a real, meaningful and damaging step backwards for the music industry.
Apple’s approach has always been to grow the pie. By creating new marketplaces, we can create more opportunities not just for our business, but for artists, creators, entrepreneurs and every “crazy one” with a big idea. That’s in our DNA, it’s the right model to grow the next big app ideas and, ultimately, it’s better for customers.
We’re proud of the work we’ve done to help Spotify build a successful business reaching hundreds of millions of music lovers, and we wish them continued success — after all, that was the whole point of creating the App Store in the first place.