Analysis The audiobook market The great audio mystery I
An absence of full-market data prohibits an exhaustive audio analysis, but some format vagaries are impossible to ignore. Kiera O’Brien reports
T’S APPOSITE THAT Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: The Defini- tive Collection is currently 2017’s most popular audio download, as the great audiobook mystery of our time is simi- lar to that of Holmes’ famous “curious incident of the dog in the night-time”, with the dog that didn’t bark being the clue that solved the crime. Like Holmes, anyone trying to gauge how much the audio market is worth knows that the answer is in the information that we don’t have available. With Audible choosing not to share its sales data, the digital share of the audio
Audio Download Ranking (2017) title
1 Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive... 2 Harry Potter... Philosopher’s Stone 3 The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson 4 Sapiens
5 The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck 6 Harry Potter... Chamber of Secrets 7 A Game of Thrones 8 The Chimp Paradox
9 Harry Potter... Prisoner of Azkaban 10 The Girl Before
11 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 12 Harry Potter... Order of the Phoenix
author narrator
Arthur Conan Doyle Stephen Fry J K Rowling Jon Ronson
Yuval Noah Harari Mark Manson J K Rowling
George R R Martin Prof Steve Peters J K Rowling JP Delaney J K Rowling J K Rowling
13 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows J K Rowling 14 Harry Potter... Half-Blood Prince 15 It
J K Rowling
16 Fantastic Beasts... Find Them 17 The Cleaner 18 Origin
19 Norse Mythology 20 The 5 Second Rule
Stephen King J K Rowling
Mark Dawson Dan Brown Neil Gaiman Mel Robbins
Stephen Fry Jon Ronson
Derek Perkins Roger Wayne Stephen Fry Roy Dotrice
Prof Steve Peters Stephen Fry
imprint Audible
Pottermore
Audible Originals Random House HarperAudio Pottermore
HarperCollins Random House Pottermore
E Fox, F Williams et al Quercus Stephen Fry Stephen Fry Stephen Fry Stephen Fry Steven Weber
Eddie Redmayne David Thorpe Paul Michael Neil Gaiman Mel Robbins
Date range Year to date 2017 Data for the Audio Download Top 20 is provided by Audible and reproduced with its permission.
Pottermore Pottermore Pottermore Pottermore
Hodder & Stoughton Pottermore Audible
Random House Audible
Mel Robbins
market is difficult to estimate. Niels- en’s Understanding the UK Audiobook Consumer report shows UK consumer downloads of audiobooks stood at five million units between January and July 2017, 14% up on 2016, and value was at £34m, a 26% boost. We can build an idea of the total audio market figure by collecting data from publishers, factoring in Nielsen’s consumer data and using US audio figures as a comparison. The Publishers Association estimated the 2016 market at £16m (based on invoiced figures supplied by those publishers publishing, as opposed to licensing, their own audio). Data from publishers seen by The Book- seller indicated a figure of around £90m. Audible’s own UK accounts show sales of £67m—growth of 54% year on year. If the UK market follows the US, then
further rises can be predicted: the Audio Publishers’ Association estimates that
5 million
The volume of the audio download market in 2016, up 14% on 2016’s figure
£34m
The value of the audio download market in 2016, up 26% on 2016’s figure
*Source: Nielsen’s Understanding the UK Audiobook Consumer survey (Jan-July 2017)
audiobook sales in 2016 totaled more than $2.1bn, up 18.2% on 2015, and with a corresponding 33.9% increase in units. It was the third consecutive year that audio sales grew by nearly 20% in volume. The UK market is likely to be further stimulated by new retailers, with Book- Beat, Kobo and
AudioBooks.com all launching their audio offers this year, and Google, Apple and even Spotify likely to follow them in. There is also growth in physical—some good news for booksellers. CD sales have rallied in recent years, though their value has fallen a long way from what it used to be. Last year saw 745,778 physical audio- books sold through Nielsen BookScan’s TCM for £9.2m—a 1.23% boost on 2015’s value, but 61% down on the market’s peak of £23.7m in 2008. In the 12 monthly Audible lists in 2016,
Children’s titles claimed 40.7% of the 240 positions on offer but, incredibly, every single one of those was a Harry Poter title, with all seven of the original
FutureBook | 1st December 2017
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