Spotify is bringing its algorithm playbook to books. New real-time charts favor engagement over sales, potentially shifting how stories are written.
In its lifetime, Spotify already turned the music industry upside down and captured around a quarter of podcast market share. In 2023, the company broke into audiobooks, a natural niche for this company. Today, Spotify has decided to launch weekly charts for audiobooks where it will apply its playlist and algorithm playbook to the publishing industry.
With these charts, the audio streaming company wants to challenge traditional bestseller lists with a real-time data loop that it fully controls. By controlling these charts, it will put Spotify in a very strong position where it can pick winners and losers and essentially force authors and publishers to optimize their content for its platform’s engagement metrics as musicians have been forced to do for the last 15 years.
The audiobook charts are powered by your listening behavior and engagement rather than unit sales. Unlike traditional book charts that just log sales, ranking books based on listening behavior could see authors front-load their books with immediate action or hooks to keep engagement high. Furthermore, difficult chapters of books could lead to users skipping, which would harm the book in the algorithm; this could lead to less complex books surfacing at the top of charts.
For publishers, the introduction of charts and the metrics that go with it will be a double-edged sword. While they will get a lot of data about where listeners get bored in a title, the system will also discourage slow-build stories that could lead to a dip in attention. This new chart system could also create a feedback loop where the most popular books become even more dominant.
Going forward we will need to watch how these new engagement-based rankings affect the royalty payouts for authors who publish on the platform. If the charts end up driving more partial listens over full completions, the publishing industry could end up in a similar situation surrounding negotiations over payouts from Spotify that now affects the music industry.
