Audiobook listeners and listening hours on Spotify increased by more than 30% and 35%, respectively, from January 2024 to January 2025 in the U.S., U.K., and Australia, helping to boost audio sales of several major publishers, according to the streaming service. The growth aligns with broader industry trends. The Audio Publishers Association recently reported that audiobook sales grew by 13% in 2024, with 99% of revenues generated by digital audiobooks.
Source: New Listeners Boosting Sales for Spotify, Publishers
The ranks of media owners and entertainment companies are poised for their biggest makeover in a generation. Media titans such as Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery are cleaving off their cable-television channels, while television-station operators such as Allen Media and Apollo Global Management are exploring selling dozens of stations. Cox and Charter, two of the biggest cable and broadband companies, have agreed to merge.
The AI armageddon is here for online news publishers. Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting. Traffic from organic search to HuffPost’s desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb.
Audiobook sales returned to a double-digit growth rate in 2024, increasing 13% over 2023, according to the just-released Audio Publishers Association Sales Survey. After a number of years of sales growing at a rate of at least 10% annually, sales rose 9% in 2023. Last year, total sales from the APA members who supply data increased to $2.22 billion; the bump was driven, unsurprisingly, by digital audio.
For decades, Hollywood directors, including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron and Alex Garland, have cast artificial intelligence as a villain that can turn into a killing machine. Now Google—a leading developer in AI technology —wants to move the cultural conversations away from technology as seen in “The Terminator,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Ex Machina.”
Google and OpenAI want to reposition chatbots as virtual assistants. If high switching costs are successfully introduced into the AI market, that will cement the position of a small number of dominant businesses. Today’s general-purpose AI market is highly concentrated: four applications account for around 95% of the market. This combination of concentration and lock-in is hugely troubling for the media.