If you look at your podcast's statistics dashboard, you'll find the Springcast platform & Spotify - 2 platforms. This may be confusing. This article explores this further.
Why 2 platforms?
The short answer: this has to do with how Spotify plays your podcast's audio files.
The longer answer:
When you press "play" on the Springcast PRO player or in e.g. Apple Podcasts, at that moment the audio file is retrieved and played directly from Springcast PRO. Each time the audio file is called this way, it is counted as a download. Spotify, however, does this a little differently. They retrieve, based on the RSS feed, the audio file 1x and store it, on their own servers. When you press "play" in the Spotify app or via the Spotify website, Spotify plays the version they have stored. Because of this, we cannot register a download with every "play". To still process the downloads (also called Starts at Spotify) in Springcast RO's statistics dashboard, we retrieve this data from Spotify via the API.
Springcast PRO platform
Under the Springcast platform, when it comes to statistics, the following data/platforms are included:
- Springcast's player, whether or not embedded on your own website
- The podcast website
- Apple Podcasts
- Google Podcasts (no longer exists since 23 June 2024, but you can still see the statistics retrieved earlier in our dashboard)
- Podimo
- etcetera....
These are all platforms that call & play the audio file directly from us. This is pretty much every platform/player except Spotify.
Spotify
All data that we can retrieve from Spotify via the API is stored at Springcast under the "Spotify platform". This includes e.g. the number of Starts (downloads) and Streams (number of listeners who have listened for at least 60 seconds) and the number of followers for your podcast show.