Only three weeks ago Spotify announced a new plays function, which allowed users and consumers to see, directly within the app, how audio and video episodes are tracking with the number of times people have actively listened to it or watched, similar to YouTube. After unexpected negativity towards this change from podcasters, the company have already amended plays which will now be presented as incremental milestones instead of precise figures, with the first, once an episode received 50,000 plays.

This is significant news and does show that people can effect change on a global organisation who haven’t read the room.

The issues that emerged from plays were that –

For small scale podcasters the listening numbers could be so small as to discourage them from creating.

It does not account for listening elsewhere, so for some very popular podcasts who take pride in their listener base, their Spotify numbers did not reflect their actual audience.

Even for a major player, like Joe Rogan, one of the few remaining Spotify exclusive podcasters, despite the listening figures being in the millions, a drop from first to third on Spotify’s own ranker, the lowest ranking that podcast has seen, can make for uncomfortable public stats.

Spotify have now said:

• Play counts will be presented to Spotify users as incremental milestone markers once an episode reaches 50k plays. Until an episode reaches 50k plays, no markers, including play counts, will be visible on the episode. Once 50K plays are reached, the plays indicator on your episode will automatically be updated to the next milestone: 50K, 100K, and so on, as the episode continues to grow.

What’s not changing:

• Exact play counts will remain visible to all creators and publishers in your analytics dashboards on Spotify for Creators and Megaphone – no matter how many plays an episode has received.
• Plays tell you how many times people actively tried your content
• Streams and downloads are also still available in Spotify for Creators and Megaphone. Both of these metrics are counted after  60 seconds of engagement so you have a consistent way to think about your audience both on and off Spotify.

At the same time that Spotify rolled out plays, SoundCloud also was found to have updated terms and conditions more than a year previously also causing a significant backlash from users.

SoundCloud responded to our story sharing a letter issued by CEO Eliah Seton saying that SoundCloud has never used artist content to train generative AI, and won’t without explicit opt-in consent.

The full letter to the SoundCloud artistic community can be found here:  https://press.soundcloud.com/249951-a-letter-from-our-ceo-clarifying-our-terms-of-use

Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and podcaster for Radioinfo. Email: [email protected]