By Supantha Mukherjee

STOCKHOLM, (Reuters) – Spotify bought Findaway (a U.S.-based tech company) Thursday to increase its audiobooks offering. This acquisition is part of Spotify’s efforts to re-create its podcasting success.

Findaway has partnerships with audiobook publisher such as Amazon, Apple, iBooks and Google. It also offers a worldwide audio book catalogue. Voices allows authors to self-publish.

“This is the first big move…what we want to achieve is for Spotify consumers to be able to buy any audio book on Spotify and listen to it,” Chief Research & Development Officer Gustav Söderström said in an interview.

The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. It is anticipated that it will close during the fourth quarter. 

Spotify follows a similar strategy to its podcast business. In 2018, Spotify began podcasting and has since made several acquisitions. Analysts believe that it will overtake Apple to become the biggest podcast provider in the world by end of 2019, with 3,000,000 titles.

Already a member of Swedish audiobook streaming company Storytel, the company has also created Open Access Platform to enable publishers to stream content.

“We know from a survey that many of our users who listened to true crime podcasts also went on to buy audiobooks about true crime,” said Söderström. Publishers have huge potential, since we believe that we have a very large user base which is an ideal target audience for audiobooks.

Spotify saw a 19% increase in monthly users to reach 381 million. The company also had a revenue of approximately 2.5 billion euros ($2.87billion) during the quarter.

According to Omdia, the global market for audiobooks is estimated to reach $9.3 Billion by 2026. This compares to $4 billion in 2020.

($1 = 0.8722 euros)