Well, Spotify has officially confirmed the existence of super listeners. 

This is something we’ve been curious about for years—I personally have had multiple conversations about it and have fielded a lot of questions on the topic from my audience over the years. 

And while I still don’t have all of the information about the impact of super listeners on Spotify, one of the perks of running a music marketing agency is that I can cross-reference data from multiple accounts inside Spotify for Artists to see if there are trends we might be able to learn from.  

So, here’s what I’m seeing so far:

Let’s start with our “Active Audience”

Spotify has introduced a new panel inside Spotify for Artists labeled “Active Audience”. 

When I first accessed this page, I was met with the following prompt:

As you can see, Spotify claims our Active Audience has shown a “special interest” in our music and will play our music “4x more in the next 6 months”. 

Clearly, I don’t need to tell you that this is who we’ve been after the whole time. 

The listener breakdown

Inside the Active Audience tab, Spotify has given us a new breakdown of super listeners, moderate listeners, and light listeners for every artist. 

Here’s a look at my breakdown:

As you can see, about 5% of my “Active Audience” (which is 6,551 listeners according to this screenshot) are my super listeners, 29% are moderate listeners, and 66% are light listeners. 

Spotify specifically labels the super listener category as those who are “the most likely to keep streaming your music”. 

The patterns I’m seeing

Across all of the accounts I have access to, I am seeing that a super listener percentage of about 5% is healthy. 

In fact, a breakdown of around 5%, 30%, and 65%, respectively, seems to be about par for the course. 

So, I guess I’m about average.

Outside of the average, there are artists with a super listener percentage as high as 15%, and there are those with a percentage as low as 0.2% or 03% percent, but the majority of artists fall within the 4-6% range. 

Of the artists in the lower range or super listeners (0.2-0.3%), playlisting has been an active strategy before coming on board with DuPree X, leading to a lower percentage of Active Audience listeners overall and a much lower percentage of super listeners as a subset or that audience. 

Of the artists at the higher end (10-15%), I am seeing crystal clear genre matching (hip hop, EDM, or country music, not alt-pop, indie electronic, or British new wave, for example) and an above-average quality of music. 

In short, better music with a clear genre makes it easier for Spotify to find an audience, and that audience becomes more engaged as a result—no surprises there.

For the majority of artists in the middle, I am seeing a mixture of genre-mixing music that is in the process of finding an audience, mine included, which means those of us who are a bit more experimental in our approach may have a tougher time of it in terms of “the algorithm”. 

Again, no surprises. 

My primary takeaways here are that A) playlisting once again does not help our cause on Spotify, and B) the more genre-specific your music and the better you are at making it, the more effective your music marketing will be. 

So it’s up to each one of us whether or not we want to push the limits of creativity and find a smaller audience, play the game and find a bigger audience, or try to find a balance somewhere in between. 

I hope this helps you make more informed decisions about how to grow your fanbase. 

It certainly has done so for me.