Recently, some Spotify users began to notice that when listening to their favorite artists, their number of monthly listeners is no longer listed at the top of their profile like it used to be. Instead, the number is only visible in the artist's bio. While this may seem like a fairly insignificant change, people were quick to weigh in on social media.
Some assumed this was an update, but a Spotify spokesperson has now confirmed that this is merely a glitch. Regardless, listeners have mixed feelings about the change. Many think it's an improvement, as it could prevent listeners from prematurely judging an artist's music purely based on their popularity.
Others don't see the advantage of this and believe a change like this would be unnecessary. "For what ? This is useless lmao," one X user writes in the NFR Podcast's replies. "Cool for smaller artists. Adds an extra step for people who use the monthly listeners metric as a reason to listen to someone new based on how popular or not they are," someone else says.
Did Spotify Remove Monthly Listeners?
"This is just a bug for a small set of users. It's being fixed! Appreciate reading the feedback, though," a Spotify spokesperson said today.
While Spotify has not moved artists' monthly listeners, they have received some demands to change the way they present listeners and streams in the past. Last month, for example, Russ took to X to suggest that publicly displaying these numbers can lead to "unhealthy comparisons."
"Spotify should remove the public display of listener counts and streams It’s a catalyst for unhealthy comparisons," he wrote. "It creates misleading metrics like 'monthly listeners' and incentivizes people to cheat so they can inflate the perception of popularity Hiding the numbers would reduce the pressure to compete on inauthentic metrics and encourage a focus on the music itself."
"Look at Apple Music," Russ continued. "There are 0 convos about how music is performing on there or if streams are fake…because you don’t know!! lmao as it should be It’s nobody’s business how the music is performing outside of the artist and their team. We live in this weird time where everyone feels entitled to know everybody’s business because of social media I get it tho, from Spotify perspective having the numbers public makes it a sport which in turn drives engagement etc etc."
