I noticed that the track “Canon (Primo)” by Justice only has 5,815 plays on Spotify, even though every other track on the album has millions of plays. How is this possible? I know it’s just an interlude track that you wouldn’t listen to unless you’re listening to the full album, but still, this play count seems extremely low. What’s going on here? (I’m hoping my attached screenshot shows up here)
It’s 27 seconds long - Spotify on shuffle won’t (AFAICT) play songs below a certain length on shuffle unless you specifically like them.
So it’s probably people listening to “Justice Radio” and never being given that song.
It seems that Spotify doesn’t accurately count plays for tracks under 30 seconds. I had a look through some of the albums I know of with short tracks and here’s what I found:
- Humanz - Gorillaz / Most popular track: 214m plays vs 11 second interlude: 1,185 plays
- Absolution - Muse / Most popular track: 259m plays vs 22 second intro: 32,174 plays
- California - Blink 182 / Most popular track: 158m plays vs 16 second track: 42,616 plays
- 3 Feet High and Rising - De La Soul / Most popular track: 12m plays vs 17 second track: 1,117 plays
- The Eminem Show - Eminem / Most popular track: 1.9b plays vs 22 second track: 42,050 plays
In fact I found the MGMT album 11•11•11 has a 26 second long track with no reported plays.
So while it’s probably true that people are listening to fewer full albums than they used to in the days of vinyl or CD, it seems more likely to do with Spotify only paying royalties on tracks over 30 seconds and the discussion surrounding that.
Very interesting, thanks!
Youngsters don’t listen to albums anymore.
Did we ever? Except maybe on the first play through?
Once tapes started being more popular than ever, it became easy to record your own mixtape. So that predates me by a generation or so
I did for a bit with tapes and CDs, then didn’t for a good long while, but about a decade ago I got into vinyl, which I think is super cool because it’s somewhat difficult to drop the needle right where you want to… and at the same time, listening to one side of a record just feels like a much more atomic experience, and some artists actually build the album so that it adds another layer to the art.
I mean, I’m young and I have a full on digital collection of albums on my drive.
I don’t like mixtapes for regular listens because I might like the songs in the album if I like one song already.
I do like mixes if I just want to listen to a specific kind of music.
Even on a streaming service if I hear a band i like that I’ve not heard before from a “radio” playlist I’ll go to that band and listen to whatever thier most popular album is.
AFAIK to count as one play, a song needs to be played for more than 30 seconds (source: friend used to work at a record label), so to me it’s surprising it has any plays at all.
Might have been from before that was enforced or a temporary bug.
Or # of people that listened to it/entire album twice (27x2 > 30) which given the listener counts of the other songs seems likely.
Maybe it counts if someone downloads it?
It would be interesting to hear from an actual Spotify dev.
I’m sure they’re absolutely not allowed to tell anything related to this to the public ;)
No I’m sure they’re under NDA, but this specific example doesn’t seem like it would provide anyone trying to game the system any insight the numbers don’t already provide, unless it was something like “the real counts are zero, the numbers are inflated.”
IOW doesn’t seem like a big deal. But I can understand most Spotify devs not wanting to risk it.
Thought this was a sick burn, until I realized the track length.
Maybe people who are listening to the album have removed it from their liked/downloaded songs?
If I shuffle through a playlist and find a song that doesn’t add much or just acts as an intro to an album I usually remove it eventually.
Ayyy another justice listener, nice; how are your speakers doing btw?
Hello fellow Justice listener ✝ My speakers are getting tired of playing Generator (new track) over and over
There’s a new track? Aaahhhh!
I wonder how often Stress gets played now… 🤔
That song is aptly named. It really does sound like stress embodied through noise. And it is stressful to listen to. lol
So I’m not a programmer but I work with a few and they told me that due to the way that certain processor architectures store integers as floating-point numbers, this can happen when a track is listened to exactly 5,815 times.
