Spotify Tests Narrated Magazine Articles as Audiobooks
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 partnerships with 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 as a bridge between podcasts and full-length books, leveraging the shorter listening times that reduce the barrier to entry for new readers.
The strategic move comes after Spotify’s acquisition of narrative journalism podcast studios in the 2010s, including Gimlet Media for around $230m and The Ringer for $200m. These acquisitions have since been scaled back, with significant layoffs at both companies in 2024 and 2025 as Spotify shifted its focus from expensive narrative documentaries to cheaper conversational and video podcasts.
Today’s Articles launch marks Spotify’s re-entry into journalism through audiobooks, licensing finished magazine work rather than producing original reporting. The licensing economics are favorable: magazine articles are less expensive to acquire than narrative podcasts, narration costs are lower, and the supply pool is vast. This model also allows Spotify to avoid some of the editorial and trust-and-safety overhead associated with its podcast business, as publications handle the editing.
The launch coincides with an active period for Spotify’s audiobook division. The company has expanded its audiobook catalog to approximately 700,000 titles across 22 markets since launch, up from 150,000, with listening hours growing 60% year-over-year. Other recent initiatives include:
- Bookshop.org partnership for selling physical books in the US and UK launched in April.
- Audiobook Charts arrived in February.
- Page Match, enabling readers to scan a printed page to find the corresponding audiobook timestamp, now works in more than 30 languages.
- Audiobooks+, a €10-per-month add-on, is nearing $100m in annualized revenue.
The question remains: Will magazine readers want to listen to articles rather than read them? While Audible has offered narrated New York Times content for years and publications like The Economist, FT, and others have invested in app-native narration, none has achieved a clear monetization breakthrough. Spotify’s 650-piece test is small enough to allow for quick scaling back if engagement falls short.