1. No free tier
2. Your views determine which artists get your money.
AFAIK all of the above mentioned services pool views and give your money to the artists with the most overall views. If I listen exclusively to Scatman John's Scatman's World then I would have expected his estate to get all my money minus maybe 5% admin fees.
The sibling reply points to discover and unknowns getting any views at all. I think that is solvable with a different model. People who are unknown essentially "advertise" with the platform at the cost of 2 "views". People who listen to the unknown's song essentially earn two more views. And they might play that song later and the artist gets paid back essentially.
As a nice easter egg, I mean distributivity in the mathematical sense. y.x = y.(seconds(a) + seconds(b) + seconds(c)) = y.seconds(a) + y.seconds(b) + y.seconds(c). And y = subscription amount per month / total seconds.
The alternative is of course to take x amount of songs listened to, but this does not distribute over minutes.
I guess you can have a hybrid approach too. If the song is >10 minutes it counts as two songs, or maybe you have a continuous scale. All of the above is better for me than what Spotify does. Even better, let the paying customer decide.
But I agree that finding new artists is tricky. You can pay people to listen to your music in the hope that they later go back to listen to that music when you aren't paying them anymore.
I listen to artist A's song 1 time, you listen to artist B's song 9 times. We listen to no other songs for the month.
With pooling, A gets 10% of the money, B get's 10% of the money.
With their suggestion, they each get 50%
Then I had to explain that all the subscribers on the whole platform get pooled together.