Why do you only guarantee “Streams” and not “Monthly Listeners?”

I’d love to explain this to you.  As you know, monthly listeners is a rolling 30-day metric that can also be described as “30 day audience volume.” 

The basic principle is this: You can add more and more streams every day, but that doesn’t increase your monthly listeners if your monthly volume remains constant.  

With repeat campaigns, sometimes there is overlap which drastically increases the perceived volume. Imagine on your analytics chart a mountain at the beginning of the 30 days and a mountain at the end of the 30 days. This would result in a couple days of an extremely high monthly listener count. 

But in as little as a few days to a week, time moves forward and the first peak will pass out of the 30 day window (even when the new promotion is going strong and the second peak is still higher than ever). 

So the reason you would experience a drop in monthly listeners even with more promotion is because you’re seeing the rolling 30 analytics window move from a period of overlap (from your last campaign) to a new window of no overlap as time progresses. 

This is why monthly listeners can sometimes take a dip even when you engage in constant promotion and it’s not a perfect additive system and monthly listeners will stay the same or drop because of the skewed nature of only viewing your Spotify traffic through this one volatile metric. 

This is why we guarantee that we will deliver a certain number of streams and not a correlative increase in monthly listeners— monthly listeners mean nothing because it’s contextual to so many other time-bound (and temporary) factors.