Spotify’s podcast “plays” are a new metric for a booming industry

How do you measure a podcast? Spotify is counting the plays.

That’s the name of the audiovisual platform’s newest metric, which will apply to its library of long-form shows. By introducing a new standard measurement for podcasts, Spotify is looking to enrich its creator community and its ad partners while solidifying its position at the forefront of a booming industry.

For creators, the new metric offers “a deeper understanding of how content resonates with audiences.”

That’s how Spotify described the impact of plays in a post published on the For the Record blog. The metric only counts impressions that occurred when a user “actively listened to or watched any episode” of a podcast.

On the surface, that may seem to be a cosmetic change, but Spotify argued that plays will allow creators to draw clear conclusions about the uploads that perform the best. Play counts will be public and rounded to the nearest thousand, so listeners and viewers will be also be able to see what’s hot on Spotify at the current moment.

That bit of data figures to increase discoverability for Spotify creators, and the platform’s podcasters could benefit financially as well. Spotify has touted the success of its revamped Partner Program, which paid out more than $100 million during Q1 2025 alone. If plays do their intended job, allowing podcasters to hone in on their best-performing pieces of content, Partner Program earnings could continue to go up.

With plays, Spotify is continuing to take pages out of YouTube’s book.

The Stockholm-based platform has been clear about its plan to compete with its California-based counterpart. Part of that effort involves a shift to metrics that look familiar to YouTube creators.

Earlier this year, Spotify announced that it would start giving out gold and silver plaques to creators who achieve round-number viewership milestones on its platform. YouTube, of course, has handed out gold play buttons to channels with over one million subscribers for more than a decade.

A shift toward YouTube-style counting will continue Spotify’s evolution, even as YouTube rejiggers its own metrics. For years, online video operatives have called for more standardized metrics — that’s one of the big reasons why Meta simplified its view counts — and Spotify is making it easier to evaluate the relative success of its top-performing podcasts.

The change is also noteworthy for the podcast industry at large.

The podcast industry is growing up. That’s good news for the creators, platforms, and advertisers who stand to benefit from that surge in public interest, but it also reveals the need for consistent accounting and common-sense metrics.

To get a sense of the importance of those analytical innovations, take a look at the Golden Globes. The annual awards show recently announced that it will introduce a Best Podcast category in 2026. Only the “top 25 podcasts” will be eligible for nomination, so it will be important for platforms to measure podcasts correctly — or else the forthcoming awards will fail to reflect the reality of the industry.

With the pivot to plays, Spotify is doing its part. Creators who want to know how the change will affect them can check out the guide published by Spotify.