Booming audiobook market can accommodate new entrants, Bar-Kar tells FutureBook

The audiobook sector's boom means it will be able to accommodate Spotify's move into streaming but publishers are still only just realising the sector's potential, Bookwire's Videl Bar-Kar has said.

Bar-Kar (pictured), the firm's head of global audio, was speaking during a FutureBook panel on the future of audio featuring HarperCollins editorial director Fionnuala Barret, W F Howes general manager Miles Stevens-Hoare and Acast's UK content development manager Clarissa Pabi.

Asked by panel chair David Roper, m.d. of Heavy Entertainment, about firms such as Spotify and Netflix entering the sector, Bar-Kar said: “I think the market is still growing and there are so many people who are still coming to audio and to podcasts and audiobooks and audio originals. People are discovering these things for the first time so it's not just that the audience is fixed and publishers are serving the same audience so I think before new players start to grab market share from others, which might be happening a little bit, I think the market overall is still growing so rapidly that there's space for new entrants and it's providing a very competitive landscape.”

He said Spotify had its eyes on the audiobook sector and had already seen success with the format in Germany.

Bar-Kar said: “Spotify and Deezer have already had five, six, seven years of experimenting with audiobooks or allowing audiobooks to be part of their ecosystem and that's another way that audiences have been discovering audiobooks. I think now that Spotify has had this success or this interesting run with audiobooks in Germany, publishers have discovered really new revenue streams and it hasn't cannibalised their existing digital sales. It sometimes makes up to 30% or 40% of publishers' digital audio sales which is amazing. Spotify's going to now roll that strategy or define its strategy more clearly into other markets and they're hiring people to really grow that business.”

As in Bookwire's home country of Germany, the UK audiobook market was mature but still growing, Bar-Kar said, adding that he had held more discussions with publishers this year than ever before about seriously entering the market.

“This growth is still happening and we're seeing this in so many markets,” he said. “There are a lot of forecasts saying we'll have 20%-25% global growth by the end of this year and that was predicted before the pandemic, so I think audiobooks are going to provide a really exciting new audience for publishers if that's what they want to do. I think the smart ones are really looking at it very seriously.”

Pabi said publishers needed to look for a more integrated approach that added podcasts to their publishing strategies where appropriate. Audio could often be a valuable marketing tool for the physical and other formats too she said.

“I think agility is something publishers can think about and a trans-media publishing programming strategy rather than being beholden to one format,” Pabi explained. “Any content you release essentially becomes marketing or publicity for publishing content.”