Audible debuts Audible Plus, a $7.95/month tier with unlimited access to a library of 11K+ titles spanning audiobooks, podcasts, and original productions
Audible breaks out separate pricing plan specifically for its exclusive programming. Daniel Holloway / Variety : Audible Launches New Unlimited Subscription Tier Audible Plus Rik Henderson / Pocket-lint : Audible Plus is cheaper subscription plan for those who just want podcasts Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac : Audible announces new cheaper subscription plan with exclusive podcasts and more Patrick Campanale / 9to5Toys : Audible Plus is a brand new all-you-can-listen audiobook plan Tweets: Matthew Ball / @ballmatthew : Always interesting when folks say the economics for ‘X’ in a subscription “doesn't work”. Consumers love AYCE bundle subscriptions, and inevitably, they thus emerge. Perhaps only when buoyed by platform economics, but then the economics point is wrong anyway. It can work. https://twitter.com/... Christina Warren / @film_girl : Audible is taking on Scribd and honestly as an audio lover I'm here for this. Just added like 8 titles to my library and I'll continue to pay for my one credit a month plan! https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch cashes in moves Audible made months earlier: sources reported it was in talks to acquire celebrity podcasts and weighing selling originals individually — instead, those exclusives are being pooled into one unlimited tier rather than sold à la carte. The price point also lands just under the all-you-can-listen benchmark Scribd established, with the reading service reporting more than 1M subscribers paying $8.99/month while its audiobook listening doubled.
First-order effects
- Listeners get a sub-$9 entry point to an 11K+-title library, giving Audible a second rung below its premium credit-based plan and a dedicated shelf for the original productions it was previously considering selling individually.
Second-order effects
- Scribd's $8.99 all-you-can-listen service now has a bigger rival priced beneath it, pressuring it to lean harder on differentiators like the Perks bundle it announced in May, which attaches services such as Pandora Plus to its subscription.
- Amazon's own ecosystem absorbs the shock: Amazon Music was separately preparing to add podcasts, so the company is now running two overlapping audio strategies whose catalogs will compete for the same exclusives.
Third-order effects
- The tiered ladder Audible is building here — cheap unlimited catalog plus a premium plan — is the structure that later shows up again when Spotify adds a $9.99 audiobooks access tier for US users and Audible itself returns with an $8.99 streaming tier, suggesting the single-price subscription gives way to a multi-tier ladder across spoken-word audio.
- If unlimited-catalog tiers become the acquisition funnel, spending shifts toward exclusive originals as the thing that justifies upgrading, making content exclusivity the main competitive axis in audio subscriptions.
The trend: Spoken-audio subscriptions are splitting into multi-tier ladders anchored by a cheap unlimited-catalog tier, with exclusive originals doing the work of pushing listeners upmarket.