Let's say Artist X has their music on Spotify but is currently making $0 a month. Now, for the sake of argument, let's say I spend an entire month listening to only Artist X a thousand times; I personally think it's fair in that case that whatever scraps of my Spotify fee are left for the artists should then go 100% to Artist X because they're the only ones I've listened to. So, in this utopian scenario, they might make $5.

With the current model, if I do that, Artist X gets paid near zero. So you can see how the models are indeed different.