I don't think it would be that hard to show a small histogram which had your plays bucketed across different levels of commitment, engagement or some similar metric. Or instead of doing it that way, you'd bucket the users, so say "for song X, you had 30k unique users listen to it in the royalty time period, and here's a histogram of how engaged they were, with the left side being a small number of users who listened to it a lot or didn't listen to much else, and the right side being the large pool of users who heard it once and listened to many other things.
The reason this is good for artists is that it rewards them for what many want to be cultivating anyway: a relationship with enthusiastic fans, rather than faceless "plays" which could have come from anywhere.
In any case, obviously the conversation is DOA if you start it from a foundational assumption that "a play is a play", but if we acknowledge upfront that artist compensation has always been weird and often quite unfair (see radio royalties, for example— they sure as hell aren't getting compensated by how many people were tuned into a radio station playing their song), then there's room to discuss better options in a new medium that sits somewhere in between the old roles filled by FM radio and private collections of physical media.