On 10 October, we raised concerns about the lack of transparency and consultation with authors and agents about the streaming deals that ‘all major book publishers’ have signed with Spotify.
Under the new deals – which were announced and went live at the beginning of October – subscribers to the Spotify Premium service in the UK and Australia can gain access to up to 15 hours of audiobook content per month through the Spotify app, from a catalogue of more than 150,000 audiobooks.
As far as we are aware, no authors or agents were approached for permission for such licences, and authors have not been consulted on licence or payment terms. Publishers have not contacted us since we raised our concerns.
We have drafted a letter for SoA members to write to their publishers to ask for clarification on what the deals will mean for them.
In a template letter, provided for members to adapt, we ask 15 questions about the deals – looking at whether existing contracts allow for audio stream, income calculations, protections, why authors and agents were not consulted, and more.
Please download and adapt the template letter and send it to your publisher today:
Thanks so much for this. As with the “deal” reported earlier whereby many of our books have been digitized without any permissions sought or obtained, and then fed into AI systems for various and obviously unannounced purposes, this is another attempt to destroy the concept of copyright. Elon Musk may think that AI would be “a great tutor” (another corrupt and dumb idea), but who would peoperly look after the teaching materials (i.e., our books)?