The payment model of “streams per play” has always felt wrong to me. Wouldn’t a more rational be “how does this user’s monthly fee get divided”?
Let’s say someone pays $10/month for Spotify. First Spotify takes their cut, let’s call that $3 but whatever it is. There’s $7 left. If someone ONLY listens to Taylor Swift that month then she deserves the full $7. If someone listens to 50 artists for 20 hours then those 50 artists can divide the $7.
You can set the pool size and divide the pool a few ways. I’ve got ideas for how I think that should be done. But in any case I’ve always thought the division should be on a per-user basis rather than entire ecosystem.
100% this. As a consumer that tries to do active choices the current model breaks any kind of active choices to support or not support an artist, except nudging it somewhere in the margins.
If your pot is only going to work you interact with, you can suddenly make an impact for smaller artists.
The counterargument I see is that subscribers who listen to lots of different artists will have a smaller share of the pot for each artist than someone who listen to just one artist. But I see the inequality here is not as bad as the other option where almost all my subscriber fee now goes to a few mainstream artists I probably never listened to. I also bet a lot of smaller artists would benefit more with a per-user pot, instead of always getting a minuscule share from the global pot.
Let’s say someone pays $10/month for Spotify. First Spotify takes their cut, let’s call that $3 but whatever it is. There’s $7 left. If someone ONLY listens to Taylor Swift that month then she deserves the full $7. If someone listens to 50 artists for 20 hours then those 50 artists can divide the $7.
You can set the pool size and divide the pool a few ways. I’ve got ideas for how I think that should be done. But in any case I’ve always thought the division should be on a per-user basis rather than entire ecosystem.