Spotify Audiobooks is celebrating the world’s biggest musical hitmakers. The platform is bringing books and music together in a winning collaboration with the iconic 33 1/3 series from Bloomsbury—a collection of pocket-sized books about popular music, with each book focused on an individual, genre-defining album by a top musical act, from James Brown and Celine Dion to Radiohead.
Since its inception in 2003, Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series has published more than 200 titles. Spotify just released audiobooks of 51 of them, covering a multitude of styles and periods, assuring that there’s something fun for every listener to get into. The immersive audiobooks that Spotify has on deck will cover albums such as rapper Cardi B.'s Invasion of Privacy, British rock group The Beatles' Let It Be, heavy metal band Metallica's Metallica, and pop queen Madonna's Erotica.
Several titles from the series—including Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace—will connect music to the audiobooks experience for the first time with Spotify’s Follow-Along feature. Follow-Along is an immer-sive experience the company has been testing that allows users to see additional media, including illustrations, photos, graphics, and now music, as they listen to an audiobook. When a song or album is mentioned in an audiobook from the series, the song link or album will appear so listeners can easily save to their library to enjoy later.
The title of Bloomsbury’s series, 33 1/3, refers to the revolutions per minute of a vinyl LP. Praised by fans, scholars, and musicians alike, the series offers a deep dive into the histories of seminal albums, and the books are writ-ten by notable authors or music experts, including Jonathan Lethem, Colin Meloy, Daphne Brooks, Gina Arnold, and Alan Warner, who each offer insight into what makes the given album so memorable.
Spotify is the perfect platform to spotlight the books in the series. One of the world’s most influential audio streamers, Spotify launched audiobooks as part of its Spotify Premium offering in late 2023, now giving listeners a brand-new audio experience and even more opportunity to connect with the authors they love with access to more than 400k titles in English-language markets and expansion across Europe this year.
The new collab with Bloomsbury is a terrific mashup of music and audiobooks, perfect for Spotify users looking to learn more about their favorite albums. The music and audiobook teams at Spotify are working together on the launch, bringing new features and design elements to the platform to highlight the series, which is sure to give music fans a new way to consider the songs they can’t stop listening to.
