Spotify's Summer "Read Like You Listen" marketing campaign riffs on popular music promotions to encourage people to listen to audiobooks as they would music.
The campaign includes visual and video ads for seven books. One ad, for Never Flinch by Stephen King, reads, "Stephen King just dropped a 14-hour banger," while another suggests one might "Crank up some Taylor Jenkins Reid," with an image of her new novel Atmosphere. Tina Knowles's memoir Matriarch is paired with the tagline "Pump up the Matriarch," while another ad encourages listeners to "Spin some Sci-fi," with an image of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. Listeners are urged to try Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher with the tag "Cue up some Sapkowski," and Mark Hoppus's memoir Farenheit-182 with "Blast a memoir."
"Each spot features buzzy summer book titles that span genres and elicit as much emotion as listening to this year’s songs of the summer," the company said in a press release, which also suggested listeners might "cruise down the street blasting A Court of Thorn and Roses by Sarah J. Maas,"—the seventh title in the promotion—"just as they would their favorite album."
The campaign comes amid notable growth for Spotify's audiobook service, which has attracted a significant number of new listeners and led to revenue increases at several major publishers since launching in October 2023. The streaming platform's English-language audiobook catalog now hosts more than 400,000 titles, nearly tripling in size since the Premium audiobook feature was introduced.
