Following backlash, Spotify announces new update to its podcast play count system

[Karlston]

Last week, we reported on a new feature in Spotify that rather boldly decided to show everyone exactly how many times your podcast episodes get played. The company defined a "play" as someone listening for at least 60 seconds, a metric that would then be publicly displayed right there on the episode page for all to see.

 

But, as we saw in discussions and reports, such as this one from NBC News, the new feature immediately set off alarm bells for many independent and smaller podcast creators. The fear was that low, publicly visible play counts would make their shows appear unpopular or even amateurish, potentially scaring off new listeners before they even gave the content a chance. Imagine if your show has something like "127 plays" next to it, and a behemoth show has "2 million", who is the average listener going to click on?

 

Spotify has now announced an update to this controversial feature. Here's how the modified play count feature will work: Instead of universal visibility, play counts will now only become visible as "incremental milestone markers" once an episode cracks 50,000 plays. If your episode has not hit that 50K mark, no play count or marker will be shown publicly at all. Once you hit 50,000, the display will show "50K", then "100K", and so on as listenership grows.

 

For the creators themselves, the full, exact play counts will remain accessible in their private analytics dashboards on Spotify for Creators and Megaphone, regardless of how few or how many plays an episode has received. Spotify is still standing by its "plays" metric, asserting it is "the most accurate indicator of engagement and episode popularity on Spotify." Traditional streams and downloads, also measured after 60 seconds of listening, will continue to be available for creators to track.

 

Alongside this modification, Spotify is also expanding access to "consumption hour metrics" for everyone, hosted anywhere. This metric aims to show creators not just if people started listening, but how long they stuck around. The revised play count system is scheduled to roll out "over the coming week."

 

Source

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