Music Business

Spotify Just Made It Harder For Independent Playlists To Grow, Fans To Find Great Playlists

Spotify has removed listener counts from the Discovered On section of its apps, the streamer has confirmed.

The now missing stat, which appeared on each artist’s Spotify About tab, showed how many users discovered an artist from a playlist.

before the change

One user wrote in a Spotify forum:

“Many curators on your platform used this number to gauge whether their playlists were curated well and helping artists. Artists used these numbers to pre-screen playlists when pitching music to them. You’re forcing both to rely on the playlist follower metric, which does not always indicate a helpful playlist, unfortunately. Another example of “don’t fix it if it’s not broken”.

Fans could also use the stat to gauge interest in following playlists that featured their favorite artists.

Another user wrote:

“you’re destroying opportunities for artists to get heard. **bleep** you spotify”

after the change

A Spotify spokesperson confirmed the shift:

“In the future, this info will only be available to artists and won’t be shared publicly.”

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10 Comments

    1. what other places do you recommend putting my songs in on Reddit to get people to check em out?

  1. This is actually good for music. Gives artists the semi-equal opportunity for growth. Lets hope other platforms AppleMusic, YouTube etc follows suit

  2. Its a good move! But at the same time concerning. Spotify does not care about the independent artist they want to give the impression their platform is fair. When they personally pick in choose who can be successful . At least this will limit the power of bias curators who operate off pay-for-play.

  3. How come this bs is good for music?
    Now we artists will just spend $$ blindly for playlist features that can have loads of bots and no proper streams cause we can’t rely on how many followers the playlist has, cause it might not reflect the streams.

  4. I think its good for some bad for others just like everything else in life. I actually like it cause i am biased based on how many listeners u have im less likely to listen if ur numbers r small but with no numbers imma just click on what seems interesting.

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