Spotify began testing a new content format on Tuesday: narrated long-form magazine articles, slotted in alongside audiobooks rather than podcasts.
The launch announced from the company’s newsroom on Tuesday morning, includes more than 650 English-language pieces from a roster that runs through Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Vogue, Variety, Billboard, Vibe, GQ, WIRED, Vanity Fair and Pitchfork.
The Articles, as Spotify is calling them, are each under two hours long and produced in-house by the company’s Spotify Audiobooks team. Premium users in the 22 markets where audiobooks are available can listen as part of their monthly audiobook allowance.
Free users can buy individual pieces for $1.99. The product is positioned, in Spotify’s framing, as a gateway between podcasts and full-length books, on the same logic the company has used to defend its audiobook bet: shorter listens reduce the friction that puts new readers off committing to a 12-hour novel.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!The strategic interest here is the timing. Spotify spent the back half of the 2010s acquiring narrative-journalism podcast studios at scale, including Gimlet Media for around $230m and The Ringer for $200m.
