Spotify’s play count concerns creators

There has been an adverse reaction to Spotify’s announcement that it is to add play counts to podcasts on its app - reaction which appears to have taken the company by surprise. Spotify issued a statement on Threads addressing creator concerns, telling creators it “really appreciates the honest discussion”, and that it’ll “share more” on Friday. (The responses are not great.) We don’t, yet, see any play counts published in the app.

Spotify has also been a little more open about how the play statistics are worked out. On an updated page, the company says that “plays” are the: “number of times a Spotify user actively watched or listened to your content on the Spotify app. Plays are only counted once per user per session, so if you play an episode, pause, and resume playing, that counts as one play.” Elsewhere, Spotify points out that plays of trailers or clips are not included.

How different is a “play” on each platform? The Podnews Weekly Review has a total audience size of 185 people on both Spotify and Apple Podcasts over the last 60 days. But, the play count? On Spotify, we’ve had 715 “plays”; but on Apple Podcasts, we’ve had 2,800 “plays” - almost four times as many “plays” from the same audience size. Apple measures any touch of the “play” button - probably explaining Spotify’s example above. (Here’s our overall stats, by the way, for the same time period: 11,817 downloads).

One of the highest pain points in the Podnews Report Card earlier this year was that different platforms don’t measure the same thing. We noted at the time that Spotify for Creators, Apple, and YouTube do not use the IAB standards.