[OPINION] Spotify Removing Monthly Listeners is Smart

For those who don't know, Spotify recently started rolling out an update where an artist's monthly listeners are no longer shown at the top of their profile. Some users can still see it at the top and some can only see it at the very bottom of the profile in the artist bio. At first, I thought this was a weird choice and a bad idea, but upon further reflection, it makes sense to me and I think it may be a good idea.

I come to this conclusion when I consider the recent, embarrassing phenomenon known as "stream botting. Stream botting is where artists or their labels will buy fake streams to inflate the stream/listener numbers that are shown on their Spotify profiles and music charts. To me, that is just as cringe as people who buy instagram followers.

A few months ago there was a rapper who commented on one of my posts and no joke he had 20M+ followers. Like bro, that's more followers than Ye.

I watched a clip of Russ of all people arguing that numbers are the "business side" of music and that the listener should not see that, they should just listen to the music. While I do check monthly listeners as a way to get a gauge on certain artists, it is by no means an accurate metric.

If an artist has a hundred songs with no plays, but one song that went viral, their monthly listeners will not be a good reflection of how their music performs. It feels like many people nowadays argue over their favorite artists not by citing their music, but instead by how many listeners, streams or units sold they have.

This kinda looks like Spotify is making an effort to make the music front and center. Does this make my job as a "music joumalist" more difficult? Maybe, but music should come first when it comes to fans. What do you think?