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)
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.
Maybe people listening at half speed? 😂
Interestingly it has more plays on YouTube music: