Spotify invests more than a million dollars to develop its catalogs from non -English audio books

Spotify announced on Friday that it plans to invest a million euros – or about $ 1.1 million – to enhance audible production in languages ​​other than English, starting with French and Dutch.

The investment indicates that Spotify is eager for more non -English titles in its limited library, as it tries to compete with the main players such as Audible in the Audiobooks global market of $ 8.7 billion.

The adoption was particularly slow in France and the Netherlands, which is why Spotify begins with these languages.

According to the company, less than 3 % of French language books are currently available in audio format, with only 20,000 audio books in France compared to about 750,000 material titles. In the Netherlands, about 15,000 Dutch audio books are available from a material library of 209,000 titles.

The company launched the Audiobook service in France and the Benelux region last October.

Spotify believes that slow adoption can likely be attributed to high production costs, which may prevent publishers from converting their written works into sound formats.

Although the company emphasizes its commitment to working with human narrators, Spotify has recently made a partnership with ElevenLabs recently as an effective and cost -effective solution to encourage authors to spread the implanted content of artificial intelligence. However, the use of artificial intelligence narration raised concerns within the publishing community.