Spotify Monthly Listeners and Spotify Streams Explained

Neha Singh
4 min readJun 24, 2020

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Spotify is one of the largest digital music streaming platforms. Spotify is a great place for music lovers and also for those who are looking for a platform to present their work and want to explore the world of music in all possible ways. Spotify focus to make the content accessible to all types of listeners, provided they are registered with Spotify.

Spotify Streams and Listeners are very crucial for any artist. Streaming is one of the most effective ways to present your music to the world and Monthly Listeners directly reflects the popularity of an artist.

Many users generally get confused between the two and consider them the same thing but, both Spotify Streams and Listeners are completely different. So here are some of the differences that you should know before considering both as the same.

1. What are Spotify Monthly Listeners

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Monthly Listeners are unique listeners who play your music during a period of 28-day. If your song has 1000 listeners, it means that 1000 people have listened to it for a certain period of time. These statistics are updated daily and appear both on the Spotify artist profile and directly on the timeline graph in the Spotify Audience section.

Keeping track of trends based on the schedule of your monthly listeners can give you a good idea of ​​how your music will sound over a long period of time, and help you understand the overall engagement and behavior of the listener after a new music release. To know more about immediate changes with a higher level of detail, monitor the number of daily listeners.

2. How does Spotify Calculate Monthly Listeners

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The monthly number of active Spotify users is one of the most important measures used by the music industry to assess the attractiveness of an artist and the size of his fan base. But the question is how does exactly Spotify calculate monthly listeners?

· Spotify monthly listeners are calculated in a continuous 28-day window because the number of days can vary in a calendar month and because people listen to music differently depending on the day of the week.

· This means that it contains the same number of days of the week, the same number of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.

· If a user plays artist music more than once in 28 days, they are only counted once.

Fact: Spotify Listeners and Plays statistics are updated once every 24 hours at 3:00 p.m. EST.

3. What are Spotify Streams

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Spotify Streams are counted when your music is streamed by listeners for more than 30 seconds. If your music is streamed offline it will be counted on the day the listener comes online again(at least every 30 days). The total number of streams includes only those songs where you are recognized as the main artist or remixer. Thus the artist should focus on how to increase Spotify Plays in order to generate royalties.

4. Difference between Spotify Streams and Spotify Monthly Listeners

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· Spotify Streams is how many times your track is played whereas, Spotify Listeners are how many different persons are playing your music.

· Spotify Streams are great as they increase the statistics and generate royalties for you whereas the amount of Spotify Listeners helps to measure the artist’s popularity.

· If your Spotify Listeners remain the same but your Spotify Streams increase, it means that the same groups of people are streaming your music again and again.

· The amount of Spotify Streams is always accumulative whereas the amount of Spotify Listeners oscillates.

The best thing you can see is a steady increase in Spotify Streams and Spotify Listeners. This means that your audience is increasing and they are listening to your music.

Hope you find this article helpful!

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Neha Singh
Neha Singh

Written by Neha Singh

New writer. I love to write about travel, lifestyle and social media.

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