Spotify now lets you stream narrated magazine articles, too

In Spotify’s rapidly evolving quest to become the home for all things audio, the company Announce On Tuesday it will bring long-form magazine articles to its app. Articles will be available to premium subscribers as part of 15 hours of audiobook listening time per month. Free users can choose to purchase standalone articles for $1.99.

The streaming service said that starting today, there will be more than 650 long-form magazine articles (available in English only) from a range of stories that include publications such as Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Vogue, Variety, Billboard, Vibe, GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Pitchfork. Spotify says the articles are produced in-house by its audiobook team and complement Spotify’s existing audio offerings, such as podcasts.

Spotify tells TechCrunch that narrated articles will use a mix of human and digital voice narration and that the portion of articles that use digital voice narration will be clearly labeled for users.

In addition to being another way to bring monetized audio to its app, Spotify believes adding articles could encourage users to try a different kind of listening beyond music, which could eventually lead them to try other forms of long-form listening, such as potentially more profitable audiobooks.

“By incorporating shorter content into the mix, we meet audiences where they are to help build healthy listening habits, and ultimately increase engagement with books over time,” Colleen Prendergast, director of licensing at Spotify Audiobooks, noted in a blog post. mail About launch.

At present, Spotify offers audiobook listening hours to its paid subscribers as well as “top-up” hours when listening time runs out. There’s also a $9.99 per month fee Audiobook access plan For Spotify free music listeners, and Audiobooks+ plan is $11.99 per month Which doubles the listening hours.

The addition comes on the heels of a deluge of news from the streamer in recent weeks. This has led the company to make big leaps into the world of AI-powered audio with new features Like podcasts generated by artificial intelligencesimilar to the ones you can create using a search application like Google NotebookLM, Create audiobooks powered by artificial intelligence For authors, Support for AI skins Remixes and other non-AI features, e.g Fitness content.