Five years ago, the Swedish company Storytel landed in Spain with an audiobook platform that raised many questions. There were barely 3,000 talking books in Spanish on the market, many of them home-produced, and little audio reading tradition. Today, the audiobook market moves 590 million euros a year in Spain, growing at a rate of double figures a year and there are already 25,000 titles that can be heard in Spanish. A business segment that has just taken off in our country and that aspires to reach the figures that are handled in the United States, where 75,0000 audiobooks are published in English every year and moves 5,000 million dollars, according to the latest study by WordsRated, which The business forecasts for 2030 are estimated at 20 billion.
The audiobook in Spanish does not lack an audience, if you take into account that today there are 500 million people around the world who have this language as their mother tongue. Hence, almost 50% of the 600 companies, platforms and initiatives that are currently dedicated to the production of audio entertainment in Spanish were born in Spain, according to data collected by the consulting firm Dosdoce.com. A reality that turns Spain into the main exporter of audiobooks in Spanish, to which great voices such as Ariadna Gil, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón and José Coronado have joined. “Half of the production is consumed in Spain, but the rest of the content is exported,” says Javier Celaya, partner of Dosdoce.com and one of the Spanish experts on the subject. Mexico is the second market with 20% (the rest of Latin America accounts for 16%), followed by the US (8%) and Europe (4%).
“Today no one is still making money; "It is a moment of investment, but it is an industry that is here to stay," says Celaya, who estimates that half a million users currently consume audiobooks in Spain through some of the existing platforms, which operate with monthly fees and Unlimited access to catalogs.
Storytel was the first to land. It did so in 2018 from the Nordic countries, where 50% of sales in the publishing sector already come from audiobooks. “We started with very little and now we can publish an audiobook a day,” explains Maribel Riaza, advertising director of Storytel, a company based in Stockholm, which opened a market in Spain to expand to Hispanic countries. A company that moves two million paying subscribers on a global scale and that in 2021 acquired Audiobooks.com, the second most important platform in the United States after Audible, the platform that Amazon bought in 2008 for $300 million and which is 63.4% of the market share in North America.
Audible was precisely the second platform to land in Spain on October 1, 2020, exactly three years ago today. Juan Baixeras, director for Spain and Italy at Audible, estimates that by the end of the year they will manage more than 16,000 titles, of which 250 are original paid podcasts, another emerging form of audio entertainment that is experiencing considerable growth. “We want to respond to the great growth in recorded hours that has been recorded since we started,” explains Baixeras, who estimates the hours listened to at 40 million in 2023, 75% more than in 2022, with a monthly growth of more than 25%.
Producing an audiobook costs between 3,000 and 4,000 euros. A figure that could be drastically reduced, up to 75% according to those consulted, with the input of voices produced by generative artificial intelligence. “Technology is taking an incredible leap and voices have been cloned with great quality. Sometimes it is even very difficult to identify who is the robot and who is the person,” explains Riaza. "If now all the new audiobooks cannot be produced due to the costs involved, it will be possible with voices produced through AI, which will mean an explosion for the sector."
The next 2024 and 2025 will be decisive in this sense. “If we now have 20,000 audiobooks in Spanish, we could release 80,000 new titles a year,” says the Storytel board. Despite this, “the most important books that require the most care will continue to be made with human voices,” they say from the sector. And listening to thrillers, mystery, romantic or personal development books (the most in-demand) with the whispering voices of the most renowned actors and actresses will continue to be a luxury that will define the brand of each platform.
