Comparing Spotify’s Super Listeners

Super, Active, and Light Listeners

@BRANDONVHIXON

Jun 03, 2023

This Week On The Desk

Comparing Spotify’s Super Listeners 📰
Signings ✍🏾 - Coco Jones
Creative($) of the week 👩🏽‍🎨 - Liz Hagelthorn
Links 🔗 - Cortez Bryant

Comparing Spotify’s super, active, and light listeners inside of the “active audience” tab

Many in the industry are discussing it.

Few have had the courage to go on record to quantify it.

We’ll attempt to do that here.

For context, your active audience is broken into three segments:

Super listeners: Your most dedicated active listeners in the last 28 days. They’re also the most likely to keep streaming your music.
Moderate listeners: Active listeners who intentionally streamed your music many times in the last 28 days, and could still develop into super listeners.
Light listeners: Active listeners who intentionally streamed your music once or a couple times in the last 28 days, and could develop into moderate listeners.

Simple and straightforward.

What then would be considered “average” when comparing super, moderate, and light listeners inside SFA?

We’d like to suggest the following is the average:

Super Listeners: 1–4%
Moderate Listeners: 20–35%
Light Listeners: 65–85%

It’s important to note that these numbers are based on historical averages, and can differ based on factors such as genre, whether or not discovery mode is toggled on, and wider editorial support.

That said, these numbers track.

Predictably, Spotify encourages you to engage with internal marketing tools such as promo cards, artist pick, and marquee to increase these metrics. This is unsurprising given their push to become a two-sided marketplace.

(Spoiler: they drive no results.)

No matter where you stand, hopefully this gives you a reasonable average to compare against when it comes to evaluating a release.

INR