The model should be like Medium. Allocate peoples monthly membership in accordance to their listens. If one month I listen to 100 streams of Bob Dylan and thats it, then he should get my entire $7.00 instead of just a few cents for my small amount of streams. https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-...
This seems almost too simple & good to be true. The counter points in the linked article mention that its too "computationally expensive" to calculate the payments, and the additional management costs could outweigh the benefit to smaller artists... how could that possible be true?
It's simply not true. The whole business model of Spotify is that of any other internet business, selling a zero-marginal-cost good for a subscription fee. It would be more complicated to implement a per-user breakdown, and maybe slightly more expensive to run that analytics pipeline, but at scale there's no way the additional management costs would outweigh the benefit to smaller artists. The cost of that more advanced analytics job is going to be absorbed over the entire user base to the point where it effectively costs nothing in aggregate. The real counter point is probably that it was either easier to implement the current solution (from an engineering standpoint this is true, it's much easier to aggregate and scale their payment pipeline once per-geo-region) and there has been no push for change, or it favors larger artists and labels who have the bargaining power with Spotify.