Spotify introduced earlier this month that podcast creators and listeners would get a brand new knowledge level: what number of performs an episode has gotten. The concept, according to Spotify, was that listeners may uncover new reveals they hadn’t heard of, enticed by this new public measure of fandom.
Podcasters didn’t see it that means.
For the reason that announcement, podcasters, particularly these with smaller audiences, have been upset at the new public play count. The chief criticism was that some podcasters truly don’t need listeners to know the way many individuals are listening to their podcast, as a result of it may need the other impact: it may flip folks off to know a present solely has a couple of dozen performs. Some Spotify customers in the chorus of opposition additionally famous that performs would solely present a slice of listenership, since folks use platforms in addition to Spotify.
The sustained backlash evidently hit a nerve: on Friday, Spotify introduced it was partially rolling again the characteristic. Now it is going to solely publicly show performs as soon as an episode crosses the 50,000 plays threshold. When an episode hits that benchmark, it is going to get a “50K performs” marker as an alternative of a precise depend; the marker will replace when an episode crosses different milestones, like 100,000 and 1 million performs. Podcasters will nonetheless have the ability to see actual play counts of their non-public analytics dashboards — however shall be spared the embarrassment of getting these figures broadcast publicly. The corporate can be obscure about how exactly plays are counted, saying solely that the metric represents “what number of instances folks actively tried your content material.”
Podcasting traditionally has been laborious to quantify: a obtain doesn’t essentially imply a pay attention. There are public charts, however these are inclined to favor the largest reveals. Throughout mediums, there’s the awkward rising stage for content material creators simply beginning out: you need to put up as in case you have 1,000,000 followers even when it’s simply on your 10 precise followers. Is displaying podcast performs one thing no one requested for? Completely. But additionally, the jokes write themselves, sadly.