I have been wondering for a long time how downloads from spotify are handled in the podlove statistic.
The only thread which deals with this is more than 5 years old: Spotify as a source?
Is it still the case that spotify hosts the media files by itself? Than, there would only one “counted” download per episode in the podlove statistic, when spotify fetches the media file?
In this case, we have to add the streams counted in the spotify for podcaster center “manually” to the podlove numbers, isn’t it?
Or is spotify in the meanwhile streaming the episodes from the server? In this case, would it be possible to add Spotify as a download source in the podlove statistic?
As far as I know, it is still the case that Spotify hosts the files on their own server. So indeed you have to add their numbers to Podlove’s. Not only that: when you swap out the audio file of a published episode, that won’t swap out the version that’s hosted by Spotify. I published a new version of an episode because I had accidentally uploaded a version that had a 5 second muted passage in it. After changing the file, pretty much all players used that new version, except Spotify, they still use the old one. Apparently, you need to contact them to grab the new version, I haven’t done this, yet, though, because we only have 2-3 listeners on Spotify.
By the way, when you put your Podcast up on YouTube Music, then you also have to add those numbers to the total.