Buy Spotify Monthly Listeners

Spotify counts a person as a listener once they have streamed any of your music for at least 30 seconds within the last 28 days. Play one song once or the whole catalogue twenty times, and they count once. The window moves forward a day at a time, so each listener stays in the figure for 28 days after their latest play and then drops out unless they return.

That is why the number behaves so differently from a follower count or a play count, which only grow unless something is removed. Monthly listeners measure recent attention. A strong release week lifts the figure; four quiet weeks later the same people have aged out, and the profile shows whatever listening is happening now.

Spotify's own dashboard breaks the figure down further. Spotify for Artists separates listeners who sought you out from those who met you through programmed sources such as editorial playlists, Radio or Autoplay, and it sorts the active ones by how often they came back within the same 28 days.

An order adds unique listeners to the artist you choose, at 500 to 2,000 a day once the start window has passed. Each counts from the day they play, so the figure climbs through delivery and holds while those listeners sit inside the window. And since nobody counts until they have streamed you, an order also adds streams to your tracks.

Then it falls, and the fall is arithmetic rather than a fault. Once 28 days have passed since a listener's latest play, they leave the window, exactly as someone who found you in release week would. A figure lifted by an order therefore comes back down over the following month unless new listening takes its place.

The 30-day refill cannot hold that figure up, and it is not designed to. It covers delivery: listeners who fail to arrive, or whom Spotify removes, within 30 days of the order. Spotify says it takes confirmed artificial streaming out of monthly listener counts as well as play counts, so removals can happen, and no one selling listeners can honestly tell you otherwise.

Because the figure is a window, timing decides what an order is worth. The weeks around a release are when announcements and posts send the most people to your profile, and when your own listening is at its highest, so the headline and the activity behind it roughly agree. The exception is a release you have pitched to Spotify's editors, covered below.

Start shortly before release

At 500 to 2,000 a day, a larger order takes days, sometimes weeks, to build, so start it shortly before release and the peak lands where the attention is.

Expect the slide in week five

The listeners from an order leave the window about four weeks after they arrive. Unless something new is out by then, the figure settles back to what your own listening supports.

Avoid the quiet months

An order between releases buys a number with nothing underneath it and nothing coming to replace it. It is the least useful moment to spend.

The monthly listener figure is the easiest number on Spotify to find, which is exactly why people who make decisions about artists tend not to stop there. A promoter wondering whether you can fill a room in one city cares about that city's listeners, and at the time of writing the About panel lists the top few cities for anyone who opens it.

Anyone you give Spotify for Artists access to sees much more: saves, playlist adds, streams per listener, where each stream started, and the split between people who chose your music and people who were played it. An order adds to the headline. It does not add the saves, follows and returning listeners that make a headline believable to someone reading the detail.

So we will say it plainly: a bought figure must not be used to persuade a promoter, a label or a booking agent that an audience exists. They are paying for people who will turn up, stream and buy, and presenting accounts as that audience misleads them. If the figure is meant for a pitch like that, please do not order.

If you expect the figure to stay up without new music, this is the wrong service. Nothing on Spotify holds a monthly listener count in place except people continuing to listen, and an order ages out of the window like any other listening. A month later you are back to what your own listeners support.

If a release is in front of Spotify's editors, or about to be, keep an order away from its launch. Pitches go in through Spotify for Artists a week or more ahead of release day, at the time of writing, and Spotify can answer artificial streaming by pulling songs from playlists; the release you hope to place is the last one to gamble with.

And if a distributor has already contacted you over irregular streams on any release, do not order at all. Because an order puts streams on your catalogue, it adds to exactly what the distributor is watching, and repeated flags are how a warning becomes a takedown, a suspended account or a per-track charge.

Sized against the listening a release could plausibly bring in on its own, because a figure far above that looks borrowed, and then visibly gives itself back a month later. The bands are our guidance, not Spotify's.

A first single

1,000 or 1,500, for an artist whose releases draw a few hundred listeners unaided: enough to lift the headline through release week without dwarfing the rest of the profile.

An audience elsewhere

2,500, for an artist pointing a following built on other platforms at Spotify for a release, where a few thousand listeners is a believable result.

A funded campaign

5,000, for a release backed by a proper campaign on a profile whose own listening already reaches four figures.

Thousands already listening

7,500 or 10,000, and only where release-week listening already runs into the thousands. On a smaller profile the figure would tower over followers and play counts, and the next four weeks would undo it in public.

Followers and plays do not age out after 28 days, which is worth knowing when the listener figure is going to slide back.

• FollowersA count that holds between releases, so the profile still looks lived-in once the listener figure has settled.from $1.99
• PlaysOn a track that already clears the royalty threshold through its own listeners, a count that stays put after the window has moved on.from $5.99

Something else? Write to support or read the help centre.