User 1 listens once to a 3 minute song by Ariana Grande.
User 2 listens once to a 3 minute song by Billie Eilish.
That's all they do for that month.
I think most reasonable people would say that artists A & B would split the money evenly.
Does the artist own their songs? Does the label have any control on which streaming services are used? If the artist owns all of their songs, they don’t have to stream them on Spotify.
If they really are popular, they will be popular on the platform as well. Let the statistics define the value and compensation, hopefully equally.
Why don't you think this? What's unreasonable about the distribution in this example?
> Artists should be able to negotiate how much their stream costs. reply
How could that possibly work? It would lead to shop/bandcamp style artist-fan pricing, which the casual listening market has been trained out of.