“Spotify entered the market in a very smart way,” Murray explained. “They had several 100 million listeners of music and podcasts … so it was a very small, adjacent shift for them to monetize the audiobook listener.” He also pointed out that while Amazon-owned Audible had been able to monetize the core audiobook listener, Spotify’s model taps into the potential around the more occasional audiobook listener.
“You didn’t have to sign up with a full commitment to so many books per year,” he said. “You could … do it with your 15 hours free. You could sample. And I think that entry strategy — I mean, we now know a year later — that entry strategy has been very successful for Spotify, and as a result, we get a little bit of an incremental growth in our business in total.”