How Does Spotify Determine Monthly Listeners?

Miha Prebil

Nov 3, 2025

For artists on Spotify, understanding how their audience grows is crucial. "Monthly listeners" is a key metric that many look to when gauging their popularity and reach. In this article, we will explore how does Spotify determine monthly listeners and break down some of the tools that can help artists and industry professionals track and analyze this data effectively.

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Monthly Listeners: How Are They Calculated?

Spotify's "monthly listeners" figure represents the total number of unique listeners who have streamed an artist's music in the last 28 days. This includes streams from both active and programmed sources, such as curated playlists, Discover Weekly, and autoplay. It's important to note that each unique listener is counted only once, regardless of how many times they streamed an artist's tracks.

Another key concept is the active audience. This metric is a subset of monthly listeners and refers to the listeners who have actively searched for or chosen to play an artist's music within the same 28-day period. This distinction can help artists identify the most engaged segment of their audience.

Spotify provides these metrics as part of its artist dashboard, "Spotify for Artists," but more advanced analytics are often needed by music industry professionals who want deeper insights.

The Benefits of Using Spotify Analytics from Viberate

While Spotify for Artists provides some valuable data, industry professionals often need a more comprehensive overview to inform their decisions. This is where Viberate's Spotify Analytics steps in. With analytics on over 11 million artists, Viberate offers powerful tools to understand monthly listeners, followers, streaming performance, and playlist placements—all in one place.

Here are some of the key features Viberate provides:

1. Streaming Stats in One Place

Tracking your Spotify metrics with Viberate allows you to easily see the artist's overall performance. This includes tracking monthly listeners, song performance, and other essential stats over time, giving artists and managers a clear picture of growth trends and success.

2. Audience Geolocation

Understanding where your listeners are coming from is vital for planning your next tour or promotional campaign. Viberate offers geolocation insights, allowing artists to adapt their promotional efforts and identify markets for future gigs. By pinpointing monthly listeners across cities and countries, artists can make data-driven decisions about where to focus their marketing.

3. Playlist Analytics

Playlists are one of the most important sources of streams for any artist. With Viberate's playlist analytics, you can track and analyze playlist placements, see which playlists drive the most engagement, and even identify playlists that can potentially boost the reach of your songs.

4. Charts for Talent Discovery

Discovering new talent and benchmarking against others is made easy with Viberate's customizable charts. Users can filter by trending artists, genres, and countries, making it a great tool not just for artists, but also for industry professionals seeking new talent.

5. Spotify Monthly Listeners Tracker

With Viberate, you can monitor an artist’s monthly listeners history and compare it to the industry average. This feature also offers an overview of followers, showing how an artist’s fanbase is growing over time. Such insights can be invaluable when assessing an artist’s trajectory and planning promotional strategies.

6. Detailed Song Performance Analytics

All Spotify songs are analyzed in one place with Viberate. Each song is ranked by its performance, and you can filter them by release date and sort by streams over different time periods—all-time, 12-month, 1-month, and 7-day streams. This helps in understanding which songs are resonating most with listeners and which might need additional promotional push.

7. Tracker for Streams and Other Key Stats

Viberate also offers detailed stream tracking, with performance highlights for each song and ratios like listener-to-follower and streams-to-listener over time. This helps artists understand how effectively they are converting listeners into followers and ultimately building a loyal fanbase.

8. Audience Insights: Where Are the Monthly Listeners Coming From?

Viberate provides an in-depth look into the origins of an artist’s audience, showing a map of monthly listeners across cities and countries. This is particularly useful for planning targeted promotional campaigns and adapting tour schedules to maximize audience engagement where the music is being well-received.

9. Collaboration Opportunities

Another unique feature of Viberate’s Spotify analytics is the ability to plan collaborations using Spotify data. You can identify artists whose fanbases share a similar taste in music and sort them by their monthly listeners, making it easier to spot future collaboration opportunities or find artists for potential bookings.

Why Tracking Monthly Listeners Matters

The "monthly listeners" metric is a clear indicator of an artist's reach and popularity, but it only tells part of the story. By understanding the broader context—where those listeners are located, which playlists are driving new streams, and how effectively an artist is converting those streams into followers—artists and their teams can make informed decisions to grow their audience.

Using a tool like Viberate for deeper analysis provides a competitive edge. It offers a clear view not just of an artist's current standing, but also of opportunities for growth, markets to tap into, and trends that can be leveraged for future releases and collaborations.

Conclusion

Spotify's monthly listener count is a vital metric for artists aiming to grow their audience. Understanding how does Spotify determine monthly listeners can help artists make the most out of their promotional efforts. Viberate offers advanced Spotify analytics, designed specifically for music industry professionals, providing detailed insights that go far beyond the data available on Spotify for Artists.

Whether it's tracking monthly listeners, analyzing playlists, or identifying key growth markets, Viberate has all the tools necessary to help artists and industry professionals make informed decisions and drive success. For a more comprehensive understanding of Spotify analytics, consider leveraging Viberate's platform to elevate your music career.

Source of music data: Viberate.com