There were multiple responses questioning how this was different, so I'll respond here:

- 2 users, A and B, each pay $10/month

- User A listens to 20 Taylor Swift songs

- User B listens to 5 Radiohead songs

- Spotify gets a 30% cut

Currently:

- Spotify gets $6

- Taylor Swift gets $11.20

- Radiohead gets $2.80

If each subscriber's bill was split separately:

- Spotify gets $6

- Taylor Swift gets $7

- Radiohead gets $7

So this change would benefit artists that less active Spotify users listen to.

Right now the less active users are paying to support the listening of the most active users.

Personally this would make me feel like my money is more directly supporting the artists I care about.

I don’t think that would necessarily favor small artists. That would just favor artists who are listened to by people who don’t use Spotify a lot.

Right now someone who only streams a few songs gets a very small “vote” (assuming pay is per stream). That would make it so that everyone had the same “voting” power. But I doubt there’s much correlation between people who use Spotify less and small artists. In fact that’s probably a negative correlation if anything, and this could end up hurting local artists.

Sorry, I’m failing to see the difference between this and what actually happens. They currently take 70% of their revenue and split it across artists by stream, and what I’m reading is that you’re proposing is that we take each subscriber’s revenue (presumably less some profit factor - say, 30%) and split it by the artists they stream. What am I missing?

Fwiw, the actual Spotify math is a bit more complicated than just splitting by streams - I.e., https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/21/23971616/spotify-royalti...

Not sure how this favors small/local artists. Most people I know who listen to small/local artists listen to much more music than those who listen to big pop artists. That means the current system actually favors the local artists since their listeners have an outsize “vote” when all streams are bundled together.

Is there any reason to believe big artist listeners on average stream more songs per month?

A better way would be for streams to interoperate with a copyright clearance mechanism where, when an artist opts out of the regular stream users still can validate they own a copy and get access through the stream. I have a library of saved songs I never hear on Pandora, and often my favorite artists and songs get dropped leaving a rather bland experience over the long haul.

But in terms of unit economics, the bigger artists/labels (or the artists that bring more users) are responsible for funding the entire platform, no?

In other words: A small artist can _bring_ users to the platform, fair enough, but the platform that gives access to other artists and enables that needs to take the bigger share.

This is what happens already, isn't it?

I don't see how that would be different.

Do artists have a contract with Spotify or with their labels? If it's with the labels, Spotify pays the labels and they give to the artists what they agreed upon, possibly an unfairly low amount of money but contracts are contracts.

The Uruguay parliament should regulate the contracts between their local artists and the labels. Some of them will ban Uruguay artists but some of them, maybe local ones, will intercept the money no matter what.

Or Spotify makes deals with individual artists, but there is a long and thin tail of them.