Our weekly podcast updates (which you can subscribe to here) have shown a consistent downward trend in the year-over-year growth rate of downloads since the beginning of June.
Overall, 2021 has been just slightly above or on par with 2020 traffic through May, and June was the first month where 2021 saw less traffic than 2020.
The overall pattern is also reflected in the data for Top 10 publishers (for all of whom Podtrac tracks Spotify traffic).
We dug into the numbers to see what was behind this trend and here is what we found.
June download data was negatively impacted by a bug reported by Apple on their Apple Podcasts for Creators page on July 1, 2021 and described more fully in this Vulture article from Nick Quah. The below graph shows the decreased June traffic from Apple Podcasts (in the range of 20%) which was not seen with any other software client.
Adjusting for the 20% decrease in Apple Podcast downloads for the month of June, absolute downloads for June would have grown at 5% year-over-year, in line with the average monthly growth for January through May.