Spotify’s audience segments are a useful tool to gauge the efficacy of your music marketing.

But they are more than just a clever breakdown of listener behavior over the past 28 days.

We can use this data to understand how our ads are driving traffic to our work as well as how our catalog of music is performing as a whole once people reach it.

And with Spotify’s recent update to this feature, we can now unpack even more about what drives meaningful engagement for our music with respect to streams and long-term fans.

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The basics

Since the inception of Spotify’s “Segments” feature, we’ve had access to three primary groupings: our active audience, our previously active audience, and our programmed audience.

This in addition to being able to see how many total listeners we’ve had for the past two years on the platform.

Using my artist data as an example, you can see that over the past two years, I have had 173,422 listeners for my music on Spotify.

If we zoom in on the details on the right, we can see that 3% of my streams have come from my active audience, 20% have come from my previously active audience, and 77% have come from my programmed audience.

Now, given the fact that I haven’t released any new music in some time, my active audience is within the range of expectation here (at least for me—Spotify says this number should be 33%).

As an aside, this is a great case for why consistently releasing new material is an important component of successfully marketing your music.

If I were releasing more frequently, I’d expect to see that number take up a much larger portion of the pie.

The stronger number for me though, is my programmed audience.

This number demonstrates the power of Spotify’s algorithmic playlists, something I have successfully unlocked for a few of my songs and which has led to the majority of activity for my work.

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Updated features

In addition to these basic features, Spotify offers a much richer understanding of each of these audience segments.

When we select one of these three options, not only can we learn more about what this information means, but we can also see detailed information about each of these segments as well as how many streams each of them is driving.

As you can see, of my active audience (those “who have intentionally streamed [my] music in the past 28 days”), 2% are super listeners, 20% are moderate listeners, and 78% are light listeners.

But the coolest part is that now we can see what percentage of streams can be attributed to this group over the past 28 days.

For me, it is a staggering 68%!

This is a testament to the power of finding the right people with our ads.

In short, when we find the right people, they carry the team.

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So what good is this?

Ok, so we have all this data.

Some of it’s new, most of it’s old.

But what do we do with it?

Clearly, the most impactful category to pursue is our active audience.

More specifically, I’m asking myself, “How can I find more people like the 116 people who comprise the 2% of my audience who are super listeners?”

We either want this number to go up (as is the case with my catalog), or, if it’s in a healthy spot already, we want it to remain consistent as a percentage of our listeners as our overall audience increases.

Because our active audience is where the magic happens—these 116 people in my audience have a higher likelihood of following to receive new releases via Release Radar, a higher likelihood of becoming customers in the future, and they are the best indication that I am finding the right people with my ads.

And, of course, the second category to pursue is our programmed audience.

This audience is evidence that we are finding the right people on Spotify.

When Spotify understands our music and our audience, it’s going to do a better job of getting the right people to our music in the future via algorithmic playlists like Discover Weekly and Radio.

So it’s kind of a two-tiered plan of attack: find the right people with our ads, find the right people via the algorithm.

If we can find the right people with our ads, we have a higher chance of finding the right people via the algorithm as a result.

It has everything to do with who is coming off-platform to experience our music on Spotify in the first place.

This is one of the many reasons I believe in the power of ads over just about anything else.

If we can get the right people to our music effectively and consistently over time, we can hope to see that active audience size increase, which will, in theory, lead to deeper, more long-term consumption of our music from people who truly love what we do.

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