Audible competes with Spotify by considering the reasons consumers listen

In coordination with World Sleep Day in March 2024, Audible announced the launch of sleep and relaxation-related titles for their recent Sleep Collection. According to Audible, the Sleep Collection is designed for users to “discover bedtime stories, soundscapes, meditations, and more created to help you sleep and find relaxation any time of day”. In effect, it is an audio collection of bedtime stories and soundscapes featuring celebrities and compositions designed to help users fall asleep.

Though tied to a moment and specific function, Audible’s foray into functional audio indicates a consideration of the reasons that users may be listening to audio rather than just the genres of audiobooks consumers prefer. Spotify reigns over functional music, but functional spoken audio is not yet a major offering on the platform. In fact, most audio platforms are primarily focused on genre, ultimately neglecting social behaviours, moods, and activities. For now, the context and function of audio is largely the realm of music playlists.

Considering Audible does yet have a music offering, the Sleep Collection may be the first example of context-based spoken audio competing with another platform’s context-based music — and not because of the ways in which consumers can listen but because of the reasons driving consumers to listen.

Roles

This report is relevant to the following roles:

Audience Insight