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Alice and Bob both pay $10/mo

Alice listens exclusively to Drake and Bob listens exclusively to Queen. But Queen gets $5 and Drake gets $15!

Why? Alice listened to twice as many tracks as Bob.

This really doesn't seem fair, I'm a very selective listener, and my gf isn't - she just wants lots of background music. She doesn't care what the song is and I'm subsidising artists that produce music that lands in the playlists she plays ("alexa, play happy music") more than I'm contributing to artists that produce music for my tastes. This is a very different to pre-streaming.

It doesn’t matter because it would average out because you will have queen fans who listen at a high amount as well. Unless for some reason an artist has a fan base which majority listen to less music than the average person for some reason.

It absolutely does matter, and it absolutely does not even out. Background music is extremely profitable on streaming services. The more amenable to being played in the background your music is (whether at a party or around the clock at a hair salon or other business), the more you will make, at the expense of artists that are more suited for deliberate listening - even though those artists are probably why people subscribe to the streaming service in the first place.

How exactly is it bad to reward musicians for having more airtime? It seems the market is working as intended.

Although, you seem to make a good point. BMI differentiates radio royalties by number of performances[1]. Except---and I haven't researched this very well---they seem to pay more if a song is more popular.

[1] https://www.bmi.com/creators/royalty/us_radio_royalties

>even though those artists are probably why people subscribe to the streaming service in the first place.

Then surely the solution must be to try and determine which artist actually brought in the users and give them some kind of lead bonus. I would assume any platform that started doing that would eventually beat platforms that didn't because all the lead generating bands would move there and no new users would have a reason to go to the other services.

Assuming the normal and other statistical handwaving is very dangerous in this kind of dataset and application.

It will give you a high probability of being near right in a random case but completely destroys the detail. In this case the detail is niche music genres and artists, growing or dying, that contribute greatly to the "flavour and future of society". When we assume too much here we actively suppress minority positions making certain genres and use cases completely non-viable.

I highly doubt elevator music has the audience listening profile of eminem, and thus the current system either over or under pays elevator music producers.

Other areas which are likely extreme are: new EDM artists, classical compositions, play-a-long songs (ie learn guitar), cultural artists (US christian youth, Belarusian native rock).

I wouldn't see this as unfair, just changing the compensation model. In the past you still had background music playing on the radio or Musak or whatever. Now the compensation model is changing. Maybe the actual problem is people are assuming bands people actively want to listen to should be compensated more but it's actually more important to make the kind of music that ends up on the most "background listener" playlists if you want to get paid the most.

As things currently are, it seems that they aggregate all streams and all revenues and divide accordingly.

Say that someone listens to one song from one artist once a month. As things stand, that would lead to just pennies going to that artist. What OP seems to want is for 70% of that person's subscription to go to that artist.

Basically reward artists for having dedicated superfans rather than broad appeal.

Broad appeal would still result in high net earnings, possibly higher. A large number of users listen to top x / happy / study / winter playlists exclusively

> But what if you never do? Then it's actually a bit weird since your money goes to Drake while you never listen to his music.

Do they realise that someone who only listens to Drake is also going to be sending money to your artist?

I agree with you, their complaint really doesn't make sense.

It makes sense, it's about what's not written: paying users pay for everyone's listening habits, also the non-paying ones.

Not true. The free tier has its own pool, thankfully, so millions of listens on free accounts won't affect what paid listeners' payments go to.

Not true anymore? So what pays for the free listeners' plays?

Well, let's find an extreme case to point out the difference. I think it's number of streams (which for songs is going to be effectively listening time).

Let's say you have 2 artists who in one month:

1) gets 1000 fans who listen 11-hours-per-day to his and only his music. Let's call them "Drake".

2) gets 10,000,000 users to play a 2 minute catchy song, then promptly leave the platform. Let's call them "OneHitWonder"

Both have resulted in 20 million "listening minutes". However, there's a imho pretty strong case to be made that user 2) did far more to earn it than 1) did.

So effectively Spotify rewards artists that bring long term listener loyalty to specific artists rather than innovative new music makers. Not much money for attention grabbers.

So the first "1h waterfall sounds" will earn far more than "OMG NEW FUN TUNE YOU GOT TO HEAR" ... even if the second gets far more listeners.

It's an unexplained and unfair bias for a certain type of song that coincidentally favors the top 0.1% of artists.

Imagine a teenager girl playing an international pop star 2m31s song on loop for the entire evening after school, then think about her father listening to ~4m20s songs of a local rock band on his way to work

If both of them pay for an individual subscription and those were the only things they listened to that month, the Spotify pay cut would pay the pop star 100x more for the same service.