Prepare for your favourite podcasters to start asking you to rate their series five stars on Spotify as of today.

On Thursday Spotify announced that it had started rolling out ratings for podcasts. This system uses the tried and tested star system and will give listeners a chance to provide instant feedback to creators.

We are yet to see this system live on either the Android app or the Spotify app for Windows but as we are located in South Africa we suspect we’re lower on the roll out list.

“By introducing ratings, we’re making it easier for listeners to decide when to try out a new podcast that might be their next favorite. Because podcast ratings will serve as the first chance to draw new listeners in, they have the potential to build instant interest,” Spotify wrote in a press release.

Interestingly, while Spotify doesn’t mention it, a companion blog from Anchor reveals that creators will need to receive ten ratings before being able to check them on their Spotify show page.

As for review bombing, it appears as if fans will only be able to give a rating after listening to the podcast. We says this because Spotify makes specific mention of “after listening to a show, fans will have the opportunity to give it a rating”. This seems out of the ordinary so we need to test this out. Should we find you can rate a show without having to have listened to it we will amend this story.

This feature, while small, is definitely welcome. There are quite literally millions of podcasts on Spotify, 3.2 million in fact, and standing out from the crowd is tough.

Hopefully this feature helps us find more podcasts we’ll enjoy moving into the new year.