How & When Spotify Updates Play Counts

Ever wonder how and when Spotify updates play counts on tracks? Our new Spotify clients certainly do. One of the services we provide are royalty eligible Spotify plays, so we are asked frequently how the play counter works and when new plays will show up on Spotify. As you may know Spotify does not update the number of times a song has been played in real time. In fact the whole process is a bit obscure and not very well documented to begin with. On top of that there’s a ton of conflicting and inaccurate information available regarding when play counters get updated. Most of this misinformation can be found on the Spotify community forums, which is a bit ironic considering Spotify’s technical support actually refers [...]