Strange - normally you use pooling to even out the distribution, not to take from the poor to give to the rich.

I can't imagine this makes much of a difference unless users with a paid Spotify account have vastly different tastes than the non-paying ones, and even then it would depend on how much less the revenue per user they get from commercials is compared to the revenue for a paid user. Otherwise, whether a band gets paid 50% of the revenue from a single listener or 5% from the revenue of that listener plus ten non-listeners is immaterial. The money is most definitely not allotted without regard for what users listened to.