I'm not sure if it's unfair. If you think artist B is more deserving of your money than artist A despite B being listened to fewer times, then yeah this would be unfair. I'm just not sure why you would say that they deserve your money more than an artist that people listened to more often.
If I wanted to get the same behavior from Spotify, I would need to leave devices streaming at all hours, because I am competing for amount of streams against restaurants and gyms that buy a single Spotify subscription and leave it on constantly.
Yeah, there's a reason that that's illegal, but it being illegal doesn't change reality, so you're right. I hadn't considered this in previous comments until u/kgermino pointed it out in [1]. I see your point better now.
I still stand by that "more listens resulting in more money" isn't necessarily bad, but that the way of counting who gets actively listened to might need revising. Another solution to the problem is the (let's call it) Bandcamp model. I'm not opposed to that, I'm just wondering if that will solve any issues, given that I perceive the problem not as "we should pay per subscriber listening to an artist instead of per number of plays" but instead "we should not pay for illegitimate plays."
It does also make me wonder if Spotify considered this and, if yes, why they rejected it. I guess more popular artists are more important to Spotify's survival and therefore they can demand more money under the guise of it being all fair? It's quite an allegation but that's the only thing I can think of. But then, I've been wrong before :)
I'm just thinking about CD sales vs subscription. If you buy, the artist gets paid once, not for how much you listen to it. So the above just moves in that direction.
I've also seen a gym just putting popular music on repeat with Spotify. That should be at least 10.000 streams per month. Not hard to make that skew the numbers even if it's somewhat rare.
Hypothetical: I mostly listen to Spotify during workouts so I only have about 200 streams a month. My coworker has a top 40 playlist running all day so they have over 2000 streams a month.
If we each pay $11 their artists will get $20 while mine will only get $2.
I.e. even though I never listened to a top 40 song, the artists I listened to will only get $2 from my subscription, the rest will go to the artists my coworker follows
I see what you're saying in this scenario, but in general more listens resulting in more money doesn't strike me as unfair.
I'm also not opposed to doing it the way others are proposing (dividing individual subscribers' money among their played artists instead of aggregating it and doing it by number of plays). I guess that would be one way of solving this issue, even if it's not the underlying problem. In your scenario the underlying problem seems to be that someone plays generic garbage as background noise all day and thereby generates plays that a niche artist whose listeners really love their music wouldn't generate. That's a separate problem, though perhaps changing the revenue distribution model would indeed be the best way to solve this issue.
You pay $15 and listen to Bad Romance by Lady Gaga five thousand times.
We are the only Spotify users.