They could certainly “clearly pass the cost” of this on to the user by not offering Audiobooks to users who didn’t pay for the “+ # of Audiobooks” tier of Spotify Premium; instead of this horrible enshittified crap where it cuts you off midsentence like a greedy telecomm provider would. Or perhaps their limitation should be on how many titles you can listen to concurrently in a certain time period. (So if you open X books; that’s it; you have to shelve one or wait it out)
It certainly means that Spotify did a bad job at negotiating their rights to these audiobooks as well. That matters too; because that makes the product worse; and that should never have been allowed to happen. If they couldn’t have offered it nicely, they could’ve just not offered it at all or added it to a higher service tier so that the cost is diverted better.
I’m not being harsh; they bungled that initial transition badly too; despite it being a Google action.
Unfortunately they left a lot of users in the lurch when they left the Play Store as well and that too left a bad taste. It’s not exactly easy to migrate across versions and packages and software differ wildly as they allowed both versions to do their own thing without relabeling them so you could run them side-by-side.
I don’t blame them for Google’s actions; but I do blame them for how they handled it.
You might be confusing my transition into a rant against Google as blaming Termux.