You might have noticed that every set shows the listening time, eg “3d 15h” (at least until recently, now we changed this to hours only). This means that listeners have listened to a particular set 3 days and 15 hours all together (3d x 15h = 87 hours).
As we think that the time someone keeps listening to a set is of major importance, we track every minute people are listening, not only the play counts or plays of a set. Take a 60 minute set, for example, that has been played 100 times but only has 100 minutes listening time – it hasn´t kept people listening really, has it?
Nevertheless, “Plays” can be a good measure in certain cases: Take a set for example that has 100 listeners and 1000 Plays – it obviously keeps people coming back and listen to it again and again. On Play.fm you haven´t been able to see this figure so far, but our servers have been tracking it of course.
Summing up: Listeners, listening time and plays – all these figures are important when it comes to measure the popularity of DJ sets. That´s why we decided to make the following improvements:
1) The amount of listeners shown will from now on include ALL listeners, no matter if they were logged in or not. Until now the “Listeners” number has shown only those (registered) listeners that were logged in while listening. Therefore, you will now see higher listener numbers than before the change. Nevertheless, listening time (total) will be on the same level as before because the time tracking has always been based on all listeners.
2) The plays of sets will be shown, ie. how often a set has been played.
3) Listening time will be shown in hours, instead of days and hours.
And all three figures – listeners, plays and listening time – will be shown on all pages, ie DJ sets, but also accumulated on artist, label and other profiles.