Trouble in Paradise?
UPDATE:
After receiving thousands of emails from angry authors, Spotify issued a retraction email that apologized to authors for us misunderstanding their good intentions. (Note to Spotify: contracts are written and signed because we don't know your intentions. And stop trying to gaslight us.) This was followed by a new ToS that appears to be, in the words of another author JUST FINE.
But trust has been broken. It's still difficult to remove books from Findaway, (they've grayed out the convenient “delete” button and you have to email customer support and wait for them to get around to responding.) And even logging in to delete your books means you've agreed to their new terms of service, which are FINE, I'm told.
I'm still pulling my books. I don't have the emotional bandwidth to deal with a company I don't trust.
ORIGINAL POST:
My audiobooks are currently available from Audible and many other audiobook sites, such as Google Play, Chirp, Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Nobel, etc. With the exception of Audible, those files were uploaded via a distributor called Findaway Voices.
Uploading an audiobook is a long process. You have to upload each chapter, plus your intro, outro and any epilogues etc, as individual files. With my short chapters, this means each audiobook is thirty to forty files. Findaway Voices made it easy for me—I upload files once, and they distributed to around 50 different sales platforms.
Back in November 2021, Findaway Voices was acquired by Spotify. For the last two years, things have been great. Spotify brought us a larger ecosystem, getting our audiobook into more retailers with no additional effort on our side.
I guess there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Today, Spotify sent out new Terms of Service (TOS). These are the rules by which they conduct business. Continuing to use Findaway as a distributor means agreeing to these TOS en masse. The new TOS includes language that gives Spotify irrevocable and nearly unlimited rights to do whatever they want with my intellectual property, including translations, transcriptions, and even derivative products. They could take my world and characters and create a whole new story that they could then sell in any format (digital, print, audio, video, comic, etc) with no input or oversight from me—and no compensation for using my creation.
It would also allow them to use my narrators’s voices to train and clone AI audio. I don’t have the rights to their voices (just this performance) so I’m not sure if this would stand up in court. But Spotify can afford many more lawyers than me.
As you can imagine, I don’t like this. So I have requested my books be pulled from Findaway’s service. This means my audio will temporarily be unavailable on most retail platforms until I can load it directly. (It will still be on Audible, possibly iTunes, and of course, my own store.) It may be permanently unavailable on some platforms like Chirp and Hoopla.
I know I will not be the only author taking this step. I have already heard from many friends who will be doing the same. So if you buy audio somewhere other than Audible or iTunes, grab the books you want now. They may disappear soon.
Better yet, buy direct from the author. You can find my audiobooks here:
