Spotify made podcast play counts public — creators didn’t like it

Spotify announced earlier this month that podcast creators and listeners would get a new data point: how many plays an episode has gotten. The idea, according to Spotify, was that listeners could discover new shows they hadn’t heard of, enticed by this new public measure of fandom.

Podcasters did not see it that way.

Since the announcement, podcasters, especially those with smaller audiences, have been upset at the new public play count. The chief complaint was that some podcasters actually don’t want listeners to know how many people are listening to their podcast, because it might have the opposite effect: it could turn people off to know a show only has a few dozen plays. Some Spotify users in the chorus of opposition also noted that plays would only show a slice of listenership, since people use platforms besides Spotify.

The sustained backlash evidently hit a nerve: on Friday, Spotify announced it was partially rolling back the feature. Now it will only publicly display plays once an episode crosses the 50,000 plays threshold. When an episode hits that benchmark, it will get a “50K plays” marker instead of an exact count; the marker will update when an episode crosses other milestones, like 100,000 and 1 million plays. Podcasters will still be able to see exact play counts in their private analytics dashboards — but will be spared the embarrassment of having those figures broadcast publicly. The company is also vague about how exactly plays are counted, saying only that the metric represents “how many times people actively tried your content.”

Podcasting historically has been hard to quantify: a download doesn’t necessarily mean a listen. There are public charts, but those tend to favor the biggest shows. Across mediums, there’s the awkward growing stage for content creators just starting out: you have to post as if you have a million followers even if it’s just for your 10 actual fans. Is displaying podcast plays something nobody asked for? Absolutely. But also, the jokes write themselves, unfortunately.