Spotify has adopted the Alliance for Podcast Measurement’s definition of “play” into its metrics, it was announced yesterday as part of a broader set of new data and charts within the Creators Dashboard. Spotify first introduced a “plays” in May 2025, but did not explain how they were calculated; As of today, a “play” is now defined as 30 seconds of content played once per user per session (audio or video). Spotify claims that their data “helped inform” the definition of AMP; Its technical details have not been published yet.
- IABWhat is not included in AMP is that there is no definition of play in the podcast measurement guidelines under which many podcast hosting companies certify their data. Its technical documentation defines a valid download as where “enough podcast content to last 1 minute must be downloaded”, one per user per 24 hours; This is twice as long as AMP’s figure of 30 seconds. (A play is not a download; a download can never be played.)
- apple podcastsWhich is not included in AMP, Apple defines a play in Podcast Connect as “the number of plays on unique devices where the play duration is greater than 0 seconds” – and it is not limited to one per user. In practice, a “play” appears to measure every touch of the play button (even, one suspects, after stopping for turn-by-turn instructions while driving). As an example, in May, the PodNews Weekly Review podcast received 2,093 downloads but 3,200 “plays” in Apple Podcasts.
- However youtubeJoe, who is not involved in AMP, highlights “scenes” on their website, but does not publicly define what a scene is. However, it is generally accepted that “view” means a video played for at least 30 seconds (longer than that for videos). In our view, if YouTube and Spotify both now agree on a “30 second” metric – then, since that’s where most podcasts are consumed, it’s a de facto standard anyway. But, for the benefit of the industry, will everyone else agree?
- When American radio moved from 5 minutes to 3 minutes last year, it added another 23% to the numbers. We’re working on some data to find out what this might mean for podcasting.
Stampede Social has unveiled a set of new tools for podcasters using Instagram. You can set up the tool to instantly send your latest episode – complete with episode artwork – to anyone who DMs you a keyword: this makes it very easy to convert an Insta reader into a podcast listener. The tool can also be used to respond to advertisers, and it works with your existing RSS feeds.
In May last year, Spotify came under fire for listing spam podcasts that operated as links to websites for illegal drugs. Following the CNN story, Spotify said they had removed them; But it sparked an investigation by US Senator Maggie Hassan, which was released yesterday. The full investigation reveals that Spotify removed 3,500 accounts (and over 57,000 individual episodes) in 2025, but did not report a single account to law enforcement. We learned that Spotify doesn’t track any use of links in episode descriptions — and some shows have been on the platform for four years.
- The committee’s report said that iHeartRadio, Amazon Music and Acast’s Podchaser also had similar spam in their directories. JellyPod, an AI-generated podcast tool, is highlighted as one of the tools used to publish this content. We’ve covered efforts to remove such spam shows in the past (like this one, in 2022, and the recent work of Podcast Index). In our opinion, this is not a Spotify problem – it’s an industry-wide issue that we must work together to tackle. It shouldn’t be hard to automatically share potentially problematic feeds across the industry: and expose podcast hosting companies that fail to adequately moderate their users’ content.