Cool, now can we get a cheaper plan that just plays music?
Sorry, best we can do is make a new tier at the same price that only plays music, while we jack up the price of the new Premium Plan to account for ‘rising market costs’!
rising market costs
= “paying right wingers like Joe Rogan to shit out podcasts on our service”
Like him or not, he’s like the most popular journalist in the world now or something.
Perhaps as likely as YouTube Premium separating music access from no ads on videos… I wish. It keeps me locked in.
Hard to beat $10 for unlimited music and podcasts + soon to be audiobooks
The audiobooks is very limited though. Just 15 hours per month (many books are longer than that) and in the case of duo and family plans, only the master account gets audiobooks.
That’s interesting I didn’t know it was limited to the main account. I’m a big audiobook listener, and the idea of being able to listen to something but then move on to something else is appealing. I pay for one credit on Audible every month but I have a lot of books, that after getting into them for a couple hours I realize they’re not really for me. That’s a lot of wasted money.  I wonder if the Spotify is going to give you the option to buy the book? 
Usually they’re integrated with server side purchases so an APK hack wouldn’t work with audiobooks. You’d have to use some sort of pirate client that I’m not aware of and may not exist. Good app idea though to pirate audiobooks from torrents to your phone. Kind of like popcorn time.
15 hours per month… just use Libby and a library card and get unlimited audiobooks for free.
https://libro.fm is a an interesting alternative to audible if you can pay.
No DRM and if your local bookshop registered themselves a percentage of what you buy is paid to them.
Huh… I mostly listen to Warhammer audiobooks. They have 4 random ones, all of them in German. >.>
"To start, we’re offering each Premium individual, as well as plan managers for Family and Duo accounts, 15 hours of listening per month—giving them the ability to enjoy as many titles as they want within that monthly allocation.
[…]
For those super audiophiles who use up their 15 hours before their monthly billing cycles refresh, you can purchase a 10-hour top-up to finish that series. Not sure how many hours you have left? Check it at any time in your in-app settings. "
No cost listed on how much the top-ups are.
I don’t know if they have these, but for the purpose of clarity it doesn’t matter.
The Martian is 11 hours.
The Color of Magic is 7 hours.
That’s two audio books that together surpassed their joke of a monthly allotment. Two.
I’d really love an audio book service like Netflix but 15 hours is a joke, that is 2 days worth of listening for me personally and a lot of books you wouldn’t be able to finish in that time.
I’ve tried the majority of the audio books services out there and they are all a load of shit, I think I’ll stick to piracy at this point, at least then I can keep the books I enjoy too to come back to again.
Use Libby, with your library card. Unlimited audiobooks and works for almost any library.
No, no it doesn’t. For a start I am not in the US so it isn’t Libby and secondly I tried the library card / app route and the selection is woefully shite.
It doesn’t even have what would be the most popular books for example say Lord of the Rings. It has a seemingly random selection. On top of that they have minimal licenses for the books so if you do manage to find something interesting you want to listen to someone may have already “rented it out” via the app and so you’d have to wait for them to “return” it before you can listen.
Library cards and apps (at least where I am) are one of the poorest choices available and that is saying something going up against the utter dogshit that is audible.
Thanks for sharing! I do think audiobooks are a much better fit than trying to make podcasts exclusive and paywalled.
