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Comment by swinglock | Hacker News Reader

They could stop paying out flat per listen.

If I pay $10 and listen to 50 tracks, I want $10 (minus the provides fee) to be split among precisely those 50 tracks.

The difference is if you only listed to 50 tracks your listens are worth more that someone that diluted their listens over 5000.

Throwing everyone's fees into one big vat and dividing that according to the total listens, is bullshit. I want my favorite artist to be paid by me and I don't want to subsidize the worlds most popular artists that I never listen to.

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That doesn't take into account the spotify cut. What would you propose? Right now spotify pays a certain amount per song played, and covers this cost by charging $10 of whatever, and hoping the average user doesn't listen to more than song_cost*songs_listened. In your scenario, suddenly spotify's business risk has been transferred over to the artists themselves - if your songs get listened to by people who listen to a lot of music, you're going to get paid less per listen.

>if your songs get listened to by people who listen to a lot of music, you're going to get paid less per listen.

That still would be fairer than the current system and that edge case would be rare.

As it stands today, we're all heavily subsidising the most popular (and well marketed) bands -not just their fans- leaving crumbs for other artists who end up having very little chance to see their lot improve at all.

I'm paying Spotify to listen to the artists I like, hoping to support them so they can make more music I like. Instead, nearly everything I pay ends up in the pockets of artist I have no affinity for.

That's your view, but artists likely hold the opposite view. I imagine they want to be paid more if more people listen to their music.

Here’s an example of what some artists want: https://www.musiciansunion.org.uk/Home/News/2020/Jun/An-Upda...

My view isn't the opposite of that.

It would be very interesting to see which artists would win/lose from this scenario.

There is a gut feeling that indies and up-and-coming artists are losing out with their fans effectively subsidizing pop that gets more ‘disposable’ plays.

I’m sure Spotify will know the numbers for moving to user centric streaming payouts, would be very interesting to know the truth of who the winners and losers would be.

There’s a bit of info and some research here: https://musically.com/2020/05/13/what-are-user-centric-music...

I think the option to be user centric could be a compelling feature for premium customers, to show money is going to artists fans love, and ultimately move more people on to the premium versions of streaming platforms

Personally at this time I’m more concerned that my Spotify subscription is subsidizing podcasts by Joe Rogan than Drake / Taylor Swift.

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