Over the last five years, leading audio platforms have invested 50 million euros to develop the Spanish audio category, helping to create new audiences for authors and incremental revenue for publishers.
Industry analyst Javier Celaya, founder of dosdoce.com, has recently published the findings of a survey of Spanish audio from 2017 to 2022. This year, 2023, Celaya suggests, will see the battle for listeners intensify. There will be new voices, new business models, and new players.
The report covers developments in Spain, Latin America, and the US Hispanic market. That diversity of Spanish-language communities is reflected in the global Spanish-language audiobooks catalog.
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“Although we all speak the same language, we have different accents, and we have different cultural backgrounds,” he tells me.
“For example, in the US, the Hispanic community is basically made of a Mexican background and then Dominican Republic or Cuban, like in Miami. Spanish from Spain audio content is narrated with this hard accent that I have, whereas the Latin American content is narrated with a Latin American accent, which is much more beautiful, much more musical,” Celaya says.
“There is also publishers and platforms which are narrating in what we call Spanish neutral, which is Spanish like from Televisa and Univision that is not Mexican, it’s not Colombian, it’s not Spanish from Spain, but everyone understands that accent.”