Your artist picture and monthly listeners

Run does not accept an artist photo upload. There is no picture field on the artist form, anywhere in the workspace.

The picture you see on an artist card is the one on that artist’s connected Spotify profile, read from Spotify and kept current automatically. The monthly listener count next to it comes from the same profile.

So the way to change your picture in Run is to change it on Spotify. Once it is live there, it follows here on its own.

Why it works this way

If you have store pages, you already keep a picture current where listeners actually see it. A second copy held by Run would start drifting the moment you uploaded it, and nothing in the product could tell you which of the two was the real one. Mirroring the store removes that whole class of problem: there is one picture, it is the one on your profile, and Run shows it.

To change it, use Spotify for Artists, which is also how you get access to your profile in the first place.

What you see, and when

Initials are the honest placeholder, not a failure. An artist who is genuinely new to streaming has no picture to mirror until their first release creates the page. See Your store pages for how that page gets linked.

How the refresh works

Nothing here needs a button.

• Connecting a Spotify profile reads it immediately, so the picture is on screen before you save. The listener count follows shortly after rather than in the same step, so a profile connected a minute ago can show a picture and no figure yet.
• Repointing the link to a different profile clears the old picture and the old count in the same save. An artist is never shown with someone else’s picture.
• After that, Run refreshes what it holds in the background, when it is more than about six hours old, and sweeps every connected profile once a day.

One rule sits underneath all of that: a read Run could not complete changes nothing. A profile that could not be reached keeps the picture and the figure it already had, because “we could not check right now” and “the profile is gone” look identical from the outside, and blanking a picture on a guess is the worse mistake.

About the listener figure

The number shown is monthly listeners on Spotify, which is the figure that moves with what a release is doing now.

• It is Spotify’s own number rather than a Run estimate, and normally the exact figure rather than a rounded one.
• Unknown is shown as unknown. When Run has no figure for an artist, the card shows a middot in that slot rather than a zero, because an artist reading as having lost their audience would be worse than one reading as having no figure yet.
• It can be a few hours behind what Spotify shows you. It is a mirror, not a live readout.
• Apple Music has no equivalent figure here.

The count is there to be looked at, and that is all. Nothing in review, in your plan limits, or in your earnings reads it. For what you actually earned, see How earnings work.

If the picture is wrong or missing

Work through it in this order:

1. Check the artist has a Spotify profile connected, on the card’s Edit profile form. No connection means no picture, by design.
2. Check the connected profile is really yours. The form shows the store’s own name for the page it verified. If that name is not you, repoint the link. See Your store pages.
3. Check the picture on Spotify itself. Run shows what the profile carries; if it changed there minutes ago, give it a few hours.
4. If the profile is right, the picture on Spotify is right, and Run still shows initials a day later, open a support request with the artist name and the profile link.