Audible is turning into more of a podcast app. The company announced today that its catalog now contains 100,000 free podcasts that are already available on other streaming platforms, including Pod Save America, This American Life, and Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. The shows are now available through the app and will soon show up on Audible’s podcast landing page. Listeners won’t need a subscription to access these shows. This move sets Audible up to compete more earnestly against Spotify and Apple Podcasts, the two biggest names in the space, as well as other, smaller competitors.
Audible, which is owned by Amazon, launched a new subscription plan called Audible Plus in August, which gives listeners access to Audible’s original audio content at a cheaper monthly cost. The catch is that they don’t receive credits to download ebooks that aren’t already free in Audible’s catalog. With these additional, freely available shows, Audible is bulking up its podcast offerings and making its app a place where its listeners can fulfill all their podcast needs, other than other services’ exclusive shows.
Still, Audible has a long way to go to reach the scale of Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Spotify says it has at least a million podcasts available to listeners, and Apple says it has 1.5 million. Although Audible’s original pieces of content number around 11,000, it’s still significantly behind in the amount of content it offers. This is a start, though, and presumably the company will continue growing what its listeners can access as its journey to audio content domination continues.
