A couple of weeks ago, a few of the over 678 million active users of the wildly popular music streaming service Spotify noticed something was missing. The metric for the monthly listener count, which is usually displayed prominently on Spotify artists’ profiles, was no longer visible. The supposed change sparked a significant amount of discussion online and in various music circles regarding whether it would be positive or negative overall.
Following the observations and conversations, Spotify’s team made a statement via socials saying, “This is just a bug for a small set of users. It’s being fixed! Appreciate reading the feedback, though.”
However, glitch or not, people had thoughts. Some are glad and welcome the fact that the metric is no longer visible, as it often creates unnecessary competition between artists and pits them against each other.
Russ, an American rapper, singer, songwriter and producer, shared his thoughts on X, saying, “Spotify should remove the public display of listener counts and streams. It’s a catalyst for unhealthy comparisons…It’s nobody’s business how the music is performing outside of the artist and their team.“
On the other hand, others say that removing the monthly listener count could do more harm than good. I had the pleasure of speaking to Sophia Campanella, a junior at Rowan University in New Jersey, who is working toward a Music Industry major.
She mentioned that having metrics, such as a monthly listener count, be visible to the public and not limited to the artist’s team could be beneficial for several reasons.
“A lot of people in the music industry have access to Spotify for artists and their data,” Campanella explains. “I would think a lot of people, [like people who are] trying to write journalism articles, or just smaller people in the music industry, don’t have access to that. [It] would be kind of hard to not have that data at your fingertips.”
She also has experience in doing marketing and public relations for smaller artists, specifically singer Caroline Quinn. Campanella finds that looking at Spotify’s monthly listeners is an essential and reliable metric of an artist’s growth over time.
“It’s a big indicator of when someone’s popular or not right now; it’s less subjective than a single song,” she says. “Someone could have a song blow up and get a million streams, and then you never hear from them again, and it still says million streams, and you would never know.”
The topic of Spotify’s main competitor, Apple Music, became a topic of discussion, as the platform has never displayed a monthly listener count. Due to that factor, discourse around listener counts or artist popularity is different. Russ mentions in his previously mentioned X post that on Apple Music, “There are 0 convos about how music is performing on there or if streams are fake…because you don’t know!!” Conversely, Campanella mentioned that it was difficult to use due to the lack of available data.
“Apple Music never had any monthly listener counts,” She said. “And I think that’s why I stopped using it. I can’t measure anything”.
In conclusion, this feature is key for many people. Still, it can also be used negatively as just another way to unfairly compare one artist to another. Removing the monthly listener count was indeed a glitch as of the time of writing this, but even if it wasn’t, would it really be so bad? Or would it make growing as a smaller artist even harder than it already is?
