Photo Credit: Spotify for Artists
Spotify for Artists breaks down your ‘active audience’ — but provides no way to communicate with them.
Spotify has added a new metric to its Spotify for Artists dashboard, “Active Audience,” a new methodology for showing analytics on people who have actively streamed an artist’s music in the last 28 days.
The definition of “active” in this context is significant: this is users who “intentionally” played music by an artist. That means they played it from an artist’s profile, album or release pages, or their own library or playlists — rather than encountering it through Spotify’s algorithms.
In addition to quantifying these active listeners, Spotify for Artists categorizes them into super, moderate, and light listeners. Super listeners are the most dedicated within the last 28 days; moderate listeners are those who streamed an artist’s music “many times;” light listeners are those who streamed an artist’s music one or two times in the last 28 days.
“We’re making it even easier for you to get to know your fans and how they listen,” tweeted Spotify for Artists. “Get to know your light, moderate, and super listeners in ‘active audience’ — the part of your Spotify fanbase that’s intentionally seeking out your music.”
“With insight into the streaming habits of their most active audience, we want to help artists turn listeners into fans who engage directly with their music,” Spotify adds.
Currently, this data is purely informative — Spotify has not offered a way for artists to communicate with or market directly to these segmented audiences. Still, the data provides an essential first step to comparing fan reactions to new music and the effectiveness of marketing efforts.
Notably, Amazon Music launched a similar analytics functionality in 2020 with a dashboard that quantified “fans” and “superfans” based on their engagement with an artist’s music. Spotify’s take on these tools should prove a welcome addition for artists seeking more transparency regarding their listeners on the platform.