Understanding your audience is one of the most crucial aspects of building a successful career as an artist, but the data we provide at Spotify for Artists is equally critical when it comes to helping you understand who your art is resonating with and how they’re streaming your music.

With these new audience segments, you (and your team) will have powerful insights to help achieve your goals – not only growing your audience, but also deepening your relationship with fans.

Up until today, the data has been high level, focusing on total streams, monthly listeners, and followers to gauge how well you’re developing an audience on Spotify. While those data points are important, they lack nuance — your monthly listener metric doesn’t differentiate between your biggest fans and people who have streamed you just one time.

But this nuance matters, because different types of listeners stream your music in different ways in the future. Your active audience will likely generate far more future streams of your music than listeners who have only streamed you from programmed sources. In fact, we've seen that on average, people who actively stream a song will play that artist's music 4x more in the next 6 months. We used those insights into listeners’ future streaming behavior to build audience segments.

With these new segments, you can dive deeper, understanding how listeners who stream your music in different ways reflect different levels of fandom.

Get a 360-degree view of your audience

Today we’re introducing the Segments tab, which replaces the active audience tab. It will now display your total audience — a look at your unique listeners from the past two years. It includes your active audience and two new segments: previously active audience and programmed audience.

These additional segments will provide a more complete picture of your audience, by going beyond the listeners who are actively streaming and revealing the ones who aren’t.

Understanding your total audience can help you identify areas for your audience to grow and you can measure how effectively you’re converting more casual listeners into true fans over time. Below is a breakdown to help explain what these segments are, and, more importantly, why they matter.

Previously active

Listeners in this audience were in your active audience within the past two years, but have not intentionally streamed your music in the past 28 days.

Programmed audience

These are listeners who haven’t streamed your music actively in the past two years. But they have streamed your music from programmed sources like editorial playlists, personalized playlists (like Discover Weekly, mixes, personalized editorial playlists, etc.), Radio & Autoplay, or playlists by other listeners at least once in the past two years.

Active audience

These are valuable listeners who have intentionally streamed your music in the past 28 days from active sources, including your artist profile, album and release pages, and their own libraries and playlists. On average, this active audience makes up 33% of a total audience, but about 60% of streams and 80% of merch sales on Spotify. It's important to engage these listeners so they keep listening and remain in your active audience.

Super listeners

These are your most dedicated active listeners in the past 28 days. They are also the most likely to keep streaming your music.

Moderate listeners

These are active listeners who intentionally streamed your music many times in the past 28 days. While they’re not engaging as frequently as super listeners, they could still develop into super listeners.

Light listeners

The last segment is made up of active listeners who intentionally streamed your music once or a couple times in the past 28 days. They could develop into moderate listeners.

While growing your active audience, and super listeners in particular, can have a huge impact on the number of streams you get and how much of your audience will stick around long term, your previously active and programmed audiences are valuable signals too.

Listeners in your previously active audience have already shown an interest in your music by streaming actively in the past and may be easier to re-engage. Listeners in your programmed audience, on the other hand, haven’t streamed your music actively in the past two years and may be discovering your music for the first time through channels like editorial playlists or radio.

Each of these segments is important to understand and can help you keep track of your total audience at different stages – from the listeners who just discovered your music to the ones who can’t get enough. These new audience segments can help you build a feedback loop that connects marketing and release strategies to long-term engagement and fandom – the kind that fuels long-term careers.