The public counter and your artist dashboard are separate systems, and only one of them is the reading.
The quality of trial services may differ from paid ones — the free trial is there to show you how it works.
Need more, and instantly? Buy Spotify Plays
The figure visible around a track in the app and the numbers inside an artist dashboard are compiled by different systems on different schedules. Record one and later check the other and you get a difference that describes the systems rather than the order. Choose the public view, take both readings there, and do not mix them.
Give it a full day either way. This counter reconciles rather than incrementing as things happen, so a check made shortly after the window closes usually reproduces the number you started with.
A demonstration reports whether a route works. It has nothing to say about platform rules, distributor arrangements or anything downstream of them, and those are matters to resolve on your own account before you place anything at all, free or otherwise.
What you are left with afterwards is one clean fact about a route, taken from one consistent source. Narrow, but narrow and reliable beats broad and unusable.
Short answers to what people ask most before ordering.