Why active listeners matter
Active listeners intentionally seek out your music and engage deeply, while passive listeners hear your songs through playlists. Understanding this distinction helps prioritize marketing efforts toward fans who truly support your career long-term.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today we’re going to talk about active listeners vs passive listeners. We’re going to look at it from the perspective of Spotify because they give us the most data, but the concept applies on all platforms.
Active listeners: people that listen to your music on purpose, such as going to your profile and clicking a song or clicking a link that plays your song
Passive listeners: people that listen to your music from a playlist, whether it be algorithmic, editorial or 3rd party - they don’t choose to listen to your song, it’s fed to them
Take a look at this graphic from Spotify for Artists in the mobile app:
For this artist 10% of their audience was made up of active listeners, but that represented 48% of the streams that month. These active listeners listened an average of 9.2 streams per listener. Contrast that with their ‘programmed listeners’ (another word for passive) being 1.1 streams per listener.
Think about it this way: would you rather focus on gaining fans that listen to your song 1.1 times or ones that listen 9.2 times? This is essentially the difference between focusing on growing active sources vs passive sources.
Passive listeners aren’t bad either. Algorithmic playlists are passive but they’re free and great for discovery, even if only a small minority convert to active listeners. Same for editorial playlists.
But 3rd party playlisting costs money, and it’s definitely in this passive camp. This is why I recommend artists focus the vast majority of their marketing budget on ads and not on playlisting. Playlisting can be useful for accelerating existing traction or temporarily increasing your numbers for vanity, but it’s not very effective at converting people to long term listeners like Meta ads are.
Switching back to talking about active listeners, look at this image:
This particular artist (who is nearly 100% promoted with Meta ads) has 7,605 ‘super listeners’ which Spotify defines as people who have streamed your music at least 15 times in an active manner in the last 28 days. In this case their super listeners average to 43.6 streams per listener.
Anytime someone asks you if the listeners you get from ads turn into real fans or not, just show them this section of Spotify for artists. Why would someone listen to your music over 40 times in a month if they aren’t absolutely in love with your music?
I haven’t even listened to any artist more than 40 times in the past month. Seriously, I track my music listening with LastFM, and not a single artist has more than 40 plays (the most is Karnivool at 38). I listen to a lot of artists at a time so each one gets less.
On top of the increased streaming consumption from super listeners, these fans also are much more likely to buy merch and come to shows. Spotify published a metric last year that “super listeners make up just 2% of an artist’s monthly streaming audience, yet buy 50% of concert tickets” - and I totally believe that.
Interestingly enough, Spotify is responsible for at least half of the shows i’ve seen in the past year. They surface information about shows for the bands I listen to the most. Recently they showed me Bad Omens and Unprocessed are on tour, and now I have tickets to both.
So what is my point with this post today?
Well honestly it’s really just to make sure you’re aware of this difference. I see a lot of artists focusing on marketing for vanity metrics instead of getting actually fans that might stick around long term. There are plenty of valid reasons to grow metrics for the sake of metrics, but in my opinion most of your budget should be spent on gaining actual fans.
If you’re looking for someone to run Meta ads to get more active listeners for your music, feel free to hit up my agency Southworth Media here.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.
My ad agency Southworth Media specializes in running Meta conversion ads to promote your music on streaming platforms, email list growth, tour promotion and more.
Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels and FanFunnels are the best all-in-one platforms for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels, build a mailing list and more!
1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or my team here.
New Content
In this video I walk through a case study of how we got this artist over 300,000 Spotify monthly listeners in 3 months.
I've driven hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify alone using Facebook ads (Meta ads), here's how to do it yourself.
Lookalike audiences are a way to clone your audience and find new people who 'look just like' your audience. In some cases they'll cut your cost per conversion in half, and in others they'll do worse than detailed targeting. Let's go over how to use them.
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