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Shhh - internal Spotify podcast data leaked

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This article is at least a year old

Fun napkin math corner

With the leaked Spotify data, it’s tempting to play with numbers like this:

The average length of a podcast in 2019 was 37 minutes. If 331.8m hours of podcasts were played, that’s roughly 543m podcast plays in total on Spotify.

If Spotify is roughly 20% of the industry, that could suggest the industry is 2.7 billion podcast plays a month.

If 11% of podcasts are auto-downloaded and never listened-to, that means there are globally at least 3 billion podcast downloads per month.

This figure is probably too low, though: it’s based on an assumption that nobody on Spotify ever bails out of a show early or fast-forwards it. If you assume that only two-thirds of shows are listened-to the end, that might mean 4 billion downloads a month.

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