> Way 3, which is what services actually do, is to have a much higher per-play rate and assume that users listen to n songs a month on average.
What's your source of this? I thought that all money is pooled, and then divided by total play statistics - i.e. actually numbers, not assumed values based on some guessing in advance as you suggest. That would make their business super risky. Imagine there's a holiday season and everyone listens double the usual amount. That could bankrupt a streaming company. Also, their incentives would be to discourage users of playing music, and we don't see any evidence of it.
> Way 1 is to say that x% of what you pay goes to the artists and that the streaming service takes the rest, no matter how many songs you play.
> This makes no sense; this would cause a Taylor Swift fan that listens to her for hours on end, but also listens to other music sometimes, to pay less to Swift than somebody who just plays one Swift song per month and nothing else.
This makes total sense for me as a consumer - I want my money to go exactly to the artists I'm listening to. I don't want any of my money to go to Taylor Swift or any other artist I don't care about. There are several benefits to this model:
- it would benefit small niche artists who have couple hundreds devoted fans. Maybe it would make it possible for some of them to live off the streaming, instead of getting pennies. It would reduce payouts to super starts, but I don't care about that since I'm the one who's paying and I vastly prefer that my money goes to who I want
- it would be inherently more fair than the existing model
- it would absolutely eliminate any kind of fraud as described here. You won't be able to invest $100 and receive $200 by manipulating numbers, you could only receive $100 - streaming fees
What's your source of this? I thought that all money is pooled, and then divided by total play statistics - i.e. actually numbers, not assumed values based on some guessing in advance as you suggest. That would make their business super risky. Imagine there's a holiday season and everyone listens double the usual amount. That could bankrupt a streaming company. Also, their incentives would be to discourage users of playing music, and we don't see any evidence of it.
> Way 1 is to say that x% of what you pay goes to the artists and that the streaming service takes the rest, no matter how many songs you play.
> This makes no sense; this would cause a Taylor Swift fan that listens to her for hours on end, but also listens to other music sometimes, to pay less to Swift than somebody who just plays one Swift song per month and nothing else.
This makes total sense for me as a consumer - I want my money to go exactly to the artists I'm listening to. I don't want any of my money to go to Taylor Swift or any other artist I don't care about. There are several benefits to this model:
- it would benefit small niche artists who have couple hundreds devoted fans. Maybe it would make it possible for some of them to live off the streaming, instead of getting pennies. It would reduce payouts to super starts, but I don't care about that since I'm the one who's paying and I vastly prefer that my money goes to who I want
- it would be inherently more fair than the existing model
- it would absolutely eliminate any kind of fraud as described here. You won't be able to invest $100 and receive $200 by manipulating numbers, you could only receive $100 - streaming fees