Published: August 14, 2024 · Author: BookRank Staff
At BookRank, we’re avid audiobook listeners with a deep curiosity about the audiobook industry.
More and more people are enjoying audiobooks. The majority of American adults have tried listening to an audiobook — that’s nearly 150 million people!—and 38% of adults have listened to an audiobook in the last year. This means that audiobooks are the fastest growing format in book publishing.
We started collecting data on audiobooks in July 2024. Here are some of our initial findings:
We looked at data from three of the largest audiobook platforms—Audible, Apple Books, and Spotify—and found a total of 847,685 audiobooks currently available on these platforms.
Looking at the data by release year, there’s a clear trend: we’re seeing an explosion of new audiobooks. While over 92,000 audiobooks were published in 2023, we’ve seen over 107,000 audiobooks published through mid-August 2024 alone:
Many audiobook listeners spend most of their time listening to a specific genre. To find out what's most popular, we looked at the genres of the top 100 books on Apple and Spotify in August, 2024:
For clarity, the top 3 genres—Fiction, Sci-Fi, and Romance—are significantly more popular than the rest.
Without actual sales numbers, how might we determine how popular each book is? One proxy is review counts. Each major audiobook listening platform offers a way for listeners to rate and/or review books after they’re listened—so we collected and combined the data across platforms to show the most-reviewed audiobooks published in 2024.
Each of the top genres is well-represented, as the list mostly contains fiction, romance, and sci-fi:
Looking at audiobooks published from January 1, 2024 through August 9, 2024, independent publishing was far and away the most common, accounting for around one third of all audiobooks.
Zooming out to all-time publishing numbers, there are clear leaders. RB Media stands far ahead of the rest, as the company includes multiple imprints such as Tantor Audio and Dreamscape.
There’s an incredible variety of audiobook narrators: The ~850,000 audiobooks in our database were narrated by over 160,000 unique names.
However, some narrators are truly prolific: the top narrators are each responsible for hundreds of audiobook releases.
Here are the top narrators we’ve found across all three major audiobook services, along with their most-reviewed book and the genre they most often narrate. Is your favorite narrator in the list?
These simple questions are just the beginning. At BookRank, we’re committed to helping authors, publishers, narrators, and audiobook consumers find the answers to their toughest questions about audiobooks.
Get started by checking out the audiobooks charts on BookRank, which we gather from top audiobook services like Apple Books, Spotify, and Audible. You can sign up to follow charts, books, and publishers that you’re interested in.
And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions—about this post or anything else audiobook-related!—please get in touch. We'd love to hear from you!