“La que se avecina”, broadcast on Amazon Prime Video and Telecinco, has its own audio series on Audible.
The consumption of audio books is growing in Spain. Also the podcast. But Audible is already breaking new ground to expand the possibilities of audio entertainment. It’s just 25 years since businessman Don Katz launched this audio content-focused service in the US, and two years since he arrived in Spain.
Despite the high numbers – the catalog on Audible.es has more than 100,000 titles, almost 14,000 of which are in Spanish – Juan Baixeras, general manager of the company in Spain and Italy, admits that this is only the beginning country. “We have all the work ahead of us in an industry that is still in its infancy in Spain. We have to find out what the Spanish audience is looking for. So far we know that the audio book listener wants the same thing they want when they go to a department store to buy a traditional book: best sellers. That changes little, what changes a lot is the way we can send them this audio version,” he comments to EL PAÍS at the end of November from the top of Torre Foster in Madrid, the company’s headquarters.
Juan Baixeras, head of Audible in Spain and Italy, in an image provided by the company.
Although the service, owned by Amazon since 2008, has released successful titles in its audio book version, such as the Harry Potter saga in the voice (or rather voices) of Leonor Watling, playing more than 40 characters, and the posthumous of Almudena Grande’s novel, Todo va mejorar, narrated by Aitana Sánchez Gijón and premiered on the same day that the original text appeared in bookstores, innovation comes with the creation of new formats. And with them the long-awaited new audience.
“We have to think about the behavior of the youngest between 18 and 35 years old. It’s a generation that’s more related to the shorter format like the podcast than to an audio book, which requires an average of 10 hours of listening time,” explains Baixeras. The serialized audio dramatization of novels, lasting just over two hours and divided into chapters of less than 20 minutes, is one of the ways to seduce her. Lorenzo Silva has written adaptations of his own novels The Impatient Alchemist and The Far Country of Ponds. They are presented with sound effects, a wide cast of voice actors and a soundtrack. “These are lifelong radio soap operas with a certain patina of modernity,” admits the company boss. By 2023 they plan to release six to eight audio dramatizations like Todo esto te daré by Dolores Redondo. “It’s going to be something more complex and ambitious,” says Baixeras, a text-to-sound translation that goes far beyond a loud narration.
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The commitment to this format, which is so close to the radio past, is no coincidence. “Spain has an entertainment culture based on audio because it has a very strong radio program that makes up for the lack of audiovisual formats. The regional television stations only started broadcasting here in the 1990s. And the private ones came much later than in other countries,” emphasizes Baixeras.
Sound Fictions, an emerging genre embraced by other companies such as Podium Podcast (The Sphere) and Spotify (Sound of Crime), are also creating original content in serialized form. Jodidísimas is an original work by María Dueñas, a self-proclaimed Marbella-based dramedia (dramatic comedy) starring Cayetana Guillén Cuervo and Lolita Flores.
contest
Audible launched in Spain with 6,700 titles in Spanish, a number that has doubled in the first two years. The local and international landscape may be about to change as Spotify has increased its presence in the audiobook market since this month of September. “We have the advantage over the competition that we already have a track record with book publishers, recording studios, speakers (either professional voice actors or well-known image actors), screenwriters, directors… So far we have worked with more than 2,500 people to build our catalog of titles in Spain and create an industry,” defends the director of Audible.es.
Another new format, that of audio series, expands the universe of fictions such as La que se avecina and Vis a vis with unpublished plots, made in sound and not visual, which also divide their content into sequels, as TV series do. linear or streaming platforms. The future of the platform lies much closer to these productions than to the conversational podcast. And not only in the area of fiction, but also in the area of documentary. In 2023, after El desafío: ETA and El desafío: 11-M, audio extensions equally separated by chapters of audiovisual premieres on Amazon Prime Video, “a similar project on the history of Spain” will arrive in its catalogue, a subgenre, which “has a lot of appeal to the audience”.
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