Spotify announced last week that it will be rolled out to be released on all podcasts as a way to “help new fans.” However, Podcasters responded quickly with criticism of the new feature. It will primarily promote more podcasts that are less appealing to new listeners, while still already having a large audience.
On Friday, Spotify changed courses in its planning, but did not eschew the idea completely. Now the play count will only be displayed on the show, with at least 50,000 plays each. Instead of displaying an accurate play count, specifications are only updated with certain milestones, such as 100,000 or 1 million plays.
“We plan to roll in this newly evolved version of Play Counts next week,” the company wrote in a blog post. “This update reflects evolving efforts to provide creators with the best insights and a clear experience for fans.”
For decades, the podcast hosting platform has not shared many of the show's popular public indicators. For example, Apple Podcasts had reviews and charts on their apps, but it would be hard for listeners to know if the show has a dozen or thousands of audiences.
Spotify takes an angle that this ambiguity is a disadvantage, but its creators are drawn to podcasting media because they are refreshingly different from other forms of online media. For example, when someone clicks to play on a YouTube video, they are approaching the media with existing knowledge about the number of videos and the number of people subscribe to that channel. However, podcasting allows you to level the arena for more niche creators.
Podcasters expresses their dissatisfaction with the lack of clear metrics for what is considered “play” or “stream” across a variety of different platforms.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) works with the podcast platform to establish clear metrics for what is defined as “play” and to increase the consistency of transactions between podcasters and advertisers. However, according to Podnews, the definition of what counts as “play” differs from the IAB standard on Spotify and YouTube (two of the most popular podcast listening platforms).
According to Spotify, Play Count refers to the number of times you've “actively tried” content, but streams and downloads only count after 60 seconds of engagement.