Technology

Except Spotify is one of the only hopes against Audible. Audible gives terrible deals to authors, if you sell your audiobook exclusively through audible they take a 60% cut of the sale, and if you sell through multiple audiobook stores they take 75%.

And that's just the official numbers, according to this source they actually pay out even less than that. The average author's cut for an exclusive title is only 21%, and for a non-audible exclusive is only 13%.

Large established authors get significantly better deals, but all the smaller authors desperately need audiobook rivals like spotify to be a viable alternative to Audible's monopoly death grip on the industry. So it's not as simple as "boycott spotify", spotify or someone else badly needs to succeed in getting a meaningful slice of the market.

Maybe it’s time people start taking their business elsewhere to show they are not satisfied with this deal.

I saw this getting traction on Tik Tok a few days ago warning rightsholders they have until, I think, Mar 5th to pull their content from the platform.

That’s some wild speculation there.

What you described would be a contrived and inefficient workaround that would have little to no impact on its legality compared to just using the underlying texts as part of a training corpus.

Not sure why you think Spotify wouldn’t want to eliminate the cost of voice actors and production. If you’re self-publishing, recording and producing an audiobook traditionally is a substantial expense. If Spotify can offer something like Google’s Auto-Narrated Audiobooks to authors, then that would enable them to bring those authors to Spotify (potentially exclusively).

Spotify’s goal also is not necessarily to imitate the voices from the existing audiobooks. There is a lot that goes into making an audiobook successful, and just copying the voice alone wouldn’t convey that. For example, pairing tone and cadence changes with what’s being narrated, techniques for conveying dialogue, particularly between different characters, etc.. How you speak is just as important as your raw voice.

That would allow Spotify to create audiobooks using those techniques without using the voice of anyone who hadn’t signed away rights to it. However I would argue that some of the techniques they would likely use are integral to a person’s voice.

It’s also feasible that Spotify wants to be able to take an existing audiobook and make it available with a different voice. This wouldn’t require the audiobook to have ever been trained on - they would just replace the existing voice in it with another while preserving the pauses, tone shifts, etc. (and possibly adjusting them to be appropriate for the new voice).

More closely aligned to the specific derivative work they mentioned would be to implement something like Kindle/Audible’s Whispersync, potentially in collaboration with a non-Amazon ebook retailer like Barnes&Noble or Kobo.

I mean, at a certain point this kind of thinking becomes like the MPAA's math around thinking every person downloading a movie from a streaming service was a lost sale.

Yes, this would mean a massive expansion of translated audiobooks without the labor that traditionally would have gone into creating them.

But we don't have translations for the majority of audiobooks in the majority of languages because the costs of that labor has historically outweighed the benefits of a potential expanded audience in niche languages for the long tail of audiobooks.

Personally, I'd rather live in a world where there's broad accessibility to information for all people regardless of their native languages, rather than one in which humanity tears down its own tower of Babel to artificially preserve the status quo.

If we could explain it, it would just be another rules engine 😅