I cancelled my Audible subscription for actual reasons. With a tangent via my eminent theory of rational materiality.

I’ve been reluctant to subscribe to streaming entertainment services for a long time. There’s something fleeting about the nature of them that makes me undervalue them.

We subscribe to Amazon Prime - but only because of the delivery service. We subscribe to Apple One - but only because of the wider stuff it gives in terms of kids content, storage and so on. So far the only thing we’ve watched on AppleTV+ is The Bear (which is excellent, for the record) but clearly not making the most of our subscription.

(Sidenote: We don’t generally have a lot of time for television. On the rare occasions that we do have time for something, we typically spend more time trying to find something we actually want to invest time into, to the extent that it’s either too late to get started, or we play it safe with a known quantity. For me, that tends to be the Repair Shop on iPlayer which is free¹!)

(Sidenote 2: how many times have you wanted to know exactly what you wanted to watch, but then had to search through half a dozen different streaming services to find it? Annoying.)

We’ve had borrowed subscriptions to Netflix and Disney+ but as and when access to these have been lost (i.e., through services cracking down on account sharing, those people cancelling their subs) then we weren’t inclined to take out our own. This is only partially due to how much these things have started cost with Netflix recently announcing more price hikes. Netflix and Apple are now generally pretty consistent about producing really good stuff - but I don’t particularly want to be paying on a promise that they might make something I like. I also don’t particularly like this shared ownership model where effectively we (as very infrequent users) are subsidising the very high users of the service. Granted that’s not a particularly equitable mindset to hold when you add up all the services and subscriptions you could have, at some point you have to draw line, and it’s not my job to subsidise other people’s consumption. And given that much of the enshittification of these Bay Area darlings (Netflix, Sonos, Strava etc.) is now mostly led by relentless need to satisfy shareholders, I’m even less inclined to pay for stuff that I don’t inherently get maximum value from.

So I’ll be honest - I surprised myself when I actually started paying for Audible. It came recommended from colleagues, but it also arrived at a time of podcast fatigue (themselves inundated with adverts.) I was also in full training mode for Ironman and had a lot more time available for ear juice. And on that topic, I’d finally caved in to a lot of the social media bollocks that was relentlessly hawking AG1 and subscribed to that.

So the option to branch out into slightly more illustrious, higher quality, more predictable content was appealing. The 3-month 99p trial converted into a full-fat £7.99 per month subscription, and I maintained it for around 18 months. There was a slightly sticky moment in the middle where I paused it - and then it unexpectedly auto-reinflated and started charging me again - more on this later.

And ironically it was this softening and subscribing to Audible that most likely led me to subscribe to YouTube.

For a while I enjoyed Audible - I found a couple of great things, that I ‘binge-listened’. These initially were in the non-fiction genres. I found some astonishing stuff from the likes of David Goggins and that ilk of endurance-nutcasery that were perfect fodder for the hours spent on the bike training. There is a huge amount of ‘self-help’ pish in there, some of it good but most of it utter shite, but I was surprised when I ultimately found myself in the fiction genre too.

Dune on audiobook is a long, incredible, immersive experience.

Matt’s theory of rational materiality

The economics of subscription models versus the standard method of buying things are interesting. The psychology of subscription models versus the standard method of buying things is even more interesting.

Consider the opportunity: “You can have unlimited access to a vast amount of content” and you can have that either by buying it on a monthly or annual subscription or buying it outright upfront.

It’s not a direct and fair comparison because you need to consider the Useful Economic Life of the thing in order to compare the outright cost vs the subscription cost, since in most cases there will come a time when the lifetime cost of a subscription is greater than the upfront capital cost if bought outright. It’s also usually not practical to buy the opportunity (i.e., all unlimited content) in one go and this is usually mitigated by some offers that come with some a lifetime guarantee that allows you to defer the consumption of the thing you bought until you’re ready. The primary benefit of a subscription is that you don’t commit to the full cost immediately and can usually cancel. The primary benefit of buying outright is that you usually own the thing you just bought and you may be able to recoup of some the cost on the e.g., secondhand market.

In the very specific case of entertainment, people’s attitudes are changing and so whilst in the past acquiring a large library of physical media (DVDs, CDs, books etc.) was commonplace but which came with the benefit of being a symbol of status (and some residual value that could be recouped if sold secondhand), nowadays modern life tends to prefer minimalism and convenience over ownership of material things. (Not always.)

With those caveats in place, however, my theory states that people’s reaction will be either irrational or rational and either material or immaterial about it.

It’s a question of value. (To be clear: value and cost are very different things.)

Rational people will see that it doesn’t really matter whether you pay for it at £10 (monthly subscription)) or £120 (annual subscripton) or e.g, £200 (purchase outright), the cost is actually mostly irrelevant because the cost gets them the thing they want Irrational people will likely see the frequency of the charge as being some sort of meter and that if you’re not constantly consuming as much as possible you’re not getting maximum value. They might also look at the big price and think “How much?” and balk at the thought of paying such a large amount for ‘some content they don’t own’. Immaterial people will likely value the experience of the thing they’ve consuming (as opposed to deriving value from owning the thing) Material people value owning the thing and will derive more value by owning more and more of the thing

So you can be one of four types:

• Rational immaterial - gets enjoyment from the content, values their time
• Rational material - not too bothered about how to pay for it, but wants to build their collection
• Irrational immaterial - frustrated by the new way of not owning content, wants to get their money’s worth
• Irrational material - wants as much as possible, and wants to own it, and for as cheap as possible

If I had better design skills I’d draw that in a nice 2x2 matrixy thing, but I don’t so here’s Excel:

I generally fall into an irrational material camp - the worst of both worlds! I generally expect to own something I’ve paid for and I don’t want to pay for the same thing repeatedly. So sue me.

Subscription or ownership - not both

Subscription models (should) tend to be quite straight-forward. You pay a regular fee and for that you get access to a catalogue. There might be the odd detail here - certain tiers around how much you can have and controls around how many people or devices can use the subscription (i.e. individual vs family), but generally that’s it. It is typically an ‘all you can eat buffet’ style system - cram as much in as you possibly can and the charge is the same.

(Whether the subscription actually contains the content you want is a different matter. Netflix was well known in the early days that their catalogue was generally older and missing more modern stuff. We’re starting to find increasingly that Prime has a lot of stuff but the stuff we actually want to watch, i.e., the recent and/or popular stuff is chargeable. They will also do the dirty trick of making Season 1 of a series free, to hook you in; but then subsequent series are chargeable.)

But Audible is different. The basic premise is you pay a standard fee per month and this buys you a credit². You can then spend that credit on 1 (and only 1) audio book. The book is ‘yours to keep’ forever (but is not transferable). Having the active subscription unlocks the ‘Plus library’ - i.e., the catalogue of alllll the other stuff - here’s that buffet for you and is similar to the e.g., Amaon Prime Lending Library.

If you use your credit and want another, you can pay for them on demand (at the same price as your subscription.)

Confused yet? Good - since this is where it really starts to fall apart.

Audible will often run sales and there are generally two types.

• Discounted titles

The ordinary price of e.g., £7.99 per book is typically reduced to £3.99. So you can pay real money to get additional books. Or if you have credits available you can use one of them… but you paid £7.99 for that credit! So you wouldn’t want to use a credit to buy a discounted book - that would make no sense (to an irrational material person, at least)! So you’re left with Sophie’s choice… do you buy the title at the lower price with money, do you buy the title (since you want it) with a credit? Or do you wait until the title is back to full price and then buy it with a credit? Where you sit in the Rational Materiality Matrix will determine what you do.

Either way, it’s a neat trick to get you to buy more.

• 2 for 1 sales

The second type of sale is the classic BOGOF - where you can get two titles for 1 credit. This is another great way to get you to consume more. Perceptively this doubles the value of your credits! However, the sale item never covers the full premium catalogue. There will be one or two big ticket items to draw you in, but the bulk of the sale items are promoting older titles that were otherwise not selling a lot.

If you dig enough you will usually find titles to buy, but then the question becomes: would you have bought those titles if they weren’t on offer? Did you really get extra value if you ended up buying something you didn’t really want?

But there is a deeper, darker objective to the sales which is considerably more nefarious - it is all designed to make it harder to leave the service. The more they can get you to buy (and have in your library) the harder they make it for you to cancel, since you will lose any credits you have. So you either spend your credits on titles you don’t really want, or they lock you in for more credits whilst you wait for titles you do want.

Audiobooks are a bigger commitment than podcasts. I imagine they have stats on how much time the average person spends listening and there key demographics of people and how much time they have per day to list. But for any moderately busy person, with many things competing for your attention they must be able to calculate how long it takes for an average book to complete. Most audiobooks will be in the 7hr - 12hr duration range (is my estimate) and so even at 1.6x speed for someone like me who has 30-45 minutes per day to listen, most books will take 10+ days to complete. I once got the complete back catalogue of Sherlock Holmes (on a 2 for 1 no less) but at 56 hours was a mammoth undertaking. It was very enjoyable but it meant by the time I’d finished, I had credits stacking up! But the point is they structure their offers around ensuring you have just enough unfinished content in your library to keep you locked in to a subscription.

You can pause your subscription, but only once per year and only for 3 months, somewhat breaking the golden rule of most subscription services. So their ‘No commitments, cancel monthly’ spiel might be technically true, but it’s not quite as simple as that.

Gah

The biggest issues of the Audible service though are as follows:

• Your credits are one and done

Once you buy an audiobook, the credit is spent and you’re in with no returns³. So you need to be pretty sure that you want the audiobook before you get it otherwise you’ve wasted a credit. This is no different to a traditional book, of course… but nobody is forcing you to buy a new book every month. This defeats the purpose of the technology of a digital subscription. With Netflix, you can watch the 1st episode of a series, heck even the first 10 minutes and abandon it at no cost if you’re not getting on with it. Not with Audible. I have several unfinished titles in my library that I thought were going to be good but weren’t⁴.

• The credit system makes no sense

Credits cost £7.99. Titles cost £7.99. There is absolutely no point to the credit system on subscription. There is no marginal benefit or incentive to it. If titles cost £7.99 but your credit cost £3.99 then the would be a clear advantage to having a regular subscription.

Moreover you can’t actually just buy titles if you don’t have an active subscription! There may be a couple I want to buy and would happily pay the price for them - but nope.

Forcing me to buy credits when I don’t want them but not allowing me to buy them when I do, is some new kind of stupid.

Surely this is all marginal cost stuff? Pay once to get the content narrated and then sell it as much as possible. So the choice becomes: more customers paying a lower price versus fewer customers paying a higher price? I’d love to see the model that shows the latter as being more profitable.

• It doesn’t add value to the standard proposition (aka it’s not cheap enough to make it worthwhile)

Why might you choose an audiobook over a normal book? Lots of reasons, but in my case it means I can ‘read’ while walking the dogs, exercising or doing other things. But I still like to read real books (and obviously I need to find time for YouTube and podcasts). I also don’t want to buy new ‘real’ books due to the space they take up - Kindle/digital editions are good, but it’s also one reason why I’ve started using the actual library a lot more, which is free⁵.

So as someone who enjoys reading, and wants to read more (which audiobooks enable), Audible leaves me conflicted. Am I to buy real books as well as audiobooks? Or replace one with the other? Do I really want an audiobook and a different real book on the go at the same time?

It staggers me that Amazon haven’t figured out that paying one price that gets you the Kindle edition and the Audible edition of the book would be the ultimate win. I could listen in the morning, read in the evening, and WhisperSync would take care of where I’d got to. This would be a huge feature.

But no. I can buy the Kindle book, if I like, but then pay more to get the Audible narration. Not the same!

They occasionally address this in the audio version where they will have supplementary interviews or input from the author (if they don’t happen to be narrating it.) This can add value above the normal book - but it’s few and far between.

Bleugh

So I cancelled Audible.

Not because of any particular issue with the content - the range of Premium titles is extensive and the Plus catalogue even bigger - it’s not without the chaff, but enough filler until your next credit arrives. But because the way the subscription does not suit me, fundamentally in the way they force you to buy pointless credits⁶. I did initially carry out a pause, thinking that was effectively the subscription on hold, so that I could work through my backlog of credits and then restart it when I’d run out of credits. But no - it was only for 3 months and it auto-reactivated without any warning. When I queried it with them, they pointed me at the Ts & Cs which I had obviously agreed to but were otherwise unmoved in to their commitment to the terms of the pause.

So this time I opted to cancel. I spent my last remaining credits on books that I hoped I’d like and pausing all my other audio content (podcasts etc.) so that I could get through my library before the subscription ended. Any Plus catalogue titles I had hoped to listen to were abandoned. Not great.

Be evil (or at least, annoying)

And then of course all the additional sales bollocks starts when you do cancel. They do their best to dissuade you from doing it - “Are you sure you want to lose access to the Plus catalogue” etc.

They immediately give me the option to pause again, despite the above and what they’d previously insisted was only one pause per year. They also allowed me to reduce the cost (effectively back to the trial cost) and they even offered me extra free credits. So yes - it is marginal cost stuff after all.

Right now if I go to the website it clearly states it’s £7.99 per month (after trial):

And that’s confirmed in the FAQs too:

But in the app (already installed on my phone, signed in and so knows I’ve cancelled my subscription), for me it’s now £9.99:

So which is it?

I absolutely hate this shit. It feels dirty and it doesn’t feel like it’s in the best interest of the consumer. Within a couple of weeks of cancelling they were emailing me about new trial offers and inducements to come back. And just to add to the confusion, someone explain this to me. It’s the SkyTV approach to subscription management - everyone knows that if you want to pay less for it you just phone up and threaten to cancel. It is after Amazon behind Audible so I’m not surprised it’s laden with this sort of trickery, but it’s annoying.

As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about values over the last 12 months (and being involved in a software company who sells things) I cannot escape the impact that immediately lowering your prices when asked has on the value of your product. At least when I tried to cancel AG1, they merrily let me cancel. No harm, no foul, no fuss - sorry to see you go. But they did not (as I’d hoped) immediately offer it to me for a cut price.

I respect that.

But any business built on a race to the bottom is only sustainable at very, very high volumes and even that is likely to be finite.

So here we are, Audible: sorry not sorry.

Posts in this Series

• Sorry not sorry Audible.
• OK Google, you win. Also - fuck you.
• So close, yet ultimately... so far: Ikea.
• In hindsight, Nespresso, you did OK
• Garmin - really doesn't care.
• eBay - apology please. I'll wait. Maybe.
• Algorithms Are Shit - Carvana, Amazon
• What is this approach to marketing? Blinds Direct
• If this is the future of challenger finance, maybe it really is time for crypto. Starling Bank
• Why I hate no-reply / unmonitored inboxes: British Airways
• Dear TripAdvisor, your systems have gone rogue