As we reported earlier this month over here, Libsyn and the team at Spotify worked together to update the system to allow for ‘Passthrough’. What this means is instead of Spotify taking a copy of your media file and serving it themselves, they instead serve the file directly from Libsyn (just like Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and many other directories do).
This change means that Libsyn can now directly track stats, instead of having to keep them separated out as we had in the past. Spotify stats are now tracked with the rest of your numbers.
Hurrah!
However, once this change was made, we discovered that we still needed to enable Destination Stats for Spotify. While the Destination stats are only visible in the Advanced stats ($20 level accounts and higher) we do place the Spotify code in for all shows to make those stats available if a user upgrades between accounts in the future.
Enabling this feature caused the Spotify application itself to redownload media files that had already been downloaded by subscribers.
This is causing a temporary spike in download numbers. Technically, they are legitimate downloads by subscribers to your show in Spotify, however, they are caused due to this forced redownload happening on Spotify’s end.
Don’t panic! This spike will last a few days at most, and return to normal. Destination stats will be counted going forward.
Have additional questions? Reach out to our friendly support team at [email protected].
