Spotify just redesigned the way you’ll ‘listen’ to audiobooks

When you consume a book, you’re always making compromises. Print means no animation and no outbound links to enhance the reading experience. E-ink often yields potato-quality images and muted colors. An iPad’s LED-backlit display strains the eyes. 

Audiobooks, meanwhile, generally rely solely on the theater of the mind. But what if they didn’t have to? Blending the audiobook experience with sight and sound might seem like fertile, if not obvious ground for innovation—but it’s not happening within a traditional publishing house. Rather, it’s happening at Spotify.

While the majority of Spotify’s audiobooks are currently just that—audio—for Bruce Holsinger’s summer hit Culpability and some 100 other books, Spotify has crafted something more. Through its new Follow Along feature, the company is bringing bespoke visuals and music to the mix, and nudges the form of the audiobook forward in the process.

Spotify sounds off

The feature, currently being tested, follows years of increased focus on the audiobook segment by the music streamer. Spotify launched an à la carte audiobook offering in 2022, and then followed it with its Audiobooks in Premium program in 2023, granting premium subscribers 15 hours of books per month.

The company currently has some 400,000 books under its belt, and is licensing, producing, and publishing more than 150 titles a year, and just last week launched a new $11.99 per month Audiobooks+ add-on, which grants 15 hours of listening on top of whatever plan one has. (It’s a business expansion that perhaps comes at an ideal time for Spotify, which just reported a 12% year-over-year rise in subscribers to 276 million—but also a Q2 net loss of around $100 million.)

‘No shade on PDFs’

The Follow Along initiative spawned from the supplementary PDF files publishers provide with audiobooks, according to Niamh Parsley, Spotify’s director of product design for audiobooks. Now, “no shade on PDFs,” Parsley says, “I love a good PDF,” but Spotify users weren’t engaging with those files much, even though they often contained rich imagery or tools to assist with the retention of complex topics.

Follow Along emerged from a thought experiment about how Spotify could get more value out of its existing content. “It really stemmed from real experiences,” says Parsley. “Wouldn’t it be cool if this cookbook that we have the audio for showed us the recipes so I can be inspired by it and be more likely to actually make the recipe?”

Rather than start with a wireframe filled with dummy text, she says the Spotify team led with the book’s actual content to create solutions organic to each book. When Follow Along first launched as a test last November, users discovered visual assets like photos and diagrams synced to the narration in real time in the Spotify app. But with the launch of the AI techno-thriller family drama Culpability last month, the team has taken the model to new levels. 

New, custom visuals

Even before Culpability became an Oprah’s Book Club pick, the Spotify team knew it’d be a hit, according to Associate Director of Audiobook Publishing Colleen Prendergast.

Spotify’s producer and casting director worked directly with author Bruce Holsinger to bring the experience to life, and hearing the narrator’s early recordings prompted the team to consider adding custom visuals to the mix for the first time. “Her performance was so multifaceted, it inspired us to explore ways to make the listener experience on Spotify even more dynamic,” recalls Prendergast.

With publisher Spiegel & Grau on board, the team began identifying moments in the manuscript that lent themselves to visual storytelling. Rodrigo Corral Design Studio had created the book’s cover, so they brought Corral and his crew into the project as well. Ultimately, the team created more than 100 custom assets for the audiobook, from section headers to chat logs and conceptual images that echo the vibe of the cover.

“We frequently create interior illustrations for printed books, but seeing these visuals integrated into the digital and audio space is genuinely new and exciting,“ says Anna Corral, partner at Rodgiro Corral. Of the process itself, she added, ”We worked to distill the emotional undercurrents into images that guide the listener without overexplaining, allowing the reader to reflect and make it their own.”

Of course, like anything new, you’ve got to figure out the best way to use it—and while listening to Culpability, I likely no doubt missed certain visuals by virtue of not staring at my phone for the duration of the book, waiting to see what might pop up. Interfaces like Apple CarPlay also don’t generally display visuals like these so as not to distract drivers—so in lieu of something like an audible chime to check your phone or tablet for a given image, you may need to hop over to the “Extras” section of the audiobook to find what you missed.

The tune of the tomes

In May, Spotify partnered with 33 ⅓, Bloomsbury’s cult-favorite line of books about popular albums, to add another Follow Along element that seems like a no-brainer for the streaming service: music. Now, when the audio books are probing an album or discussing a certain song, a link to it will appear in the app so users can save it to their library or listen in the moment. 

Currently, Follow Along is still a test feature. While Spotify declined to provide more robust usage metrics, Parsley noted that users actively engaging with the initial slate of titles’ supplementary material within the app increased by 245% over their former PDF counterparts. Publishers have been requesting the feature, according to Parsley. Spotify has also observed an increase in listeners per title, with “the hypothesis there being that providing more visual-forward experiences can entice more listening,” she says.

Ultimately, Parsley sees opportunity for not just a new visual spin on an old form, but for the types of books associated with audiobooks at large. For instance, Billie Eilish released an audio component to her eponymous photo book, and Spotify created a Follow Along experience merging both. And therein lies perhaps the next unexpected frontier for audiobooks, which Parsley enthusiastically endorses: the humble coffee table tome.

“There’s a lot of untapped potential there [with] content that is visually based, and how we can create this multimodal experience around it,” she says. “The door is wide open right now because it is so early—so it’s very exciting.”