Source: Simon Owens's Media Newsletter
YouTube's massive audio consumption—driven by users playing audiobooks as background material—is reshaping publishing's distribution landscape, but publishers have largely ceded the platform to piracy rather than licensing legitimate content. The structural advantage is already there: user base, recommendation algorithms, seamless playback. The question isn't whether YouTube can dominate audiobooks, but whether publishers will lose control of the category entirely by refusing to participate in a platform where listeners are already spending hours consuming audio content. This mirrors how music labels initially resisted Spotify, then negotiated from weakness after the habit was formed.