If the pot size stays the same, you are just shuffling around between artists. So artists who are listened to by people who only listen to a bit of music benefit, and those listened to by people who listen to a lot of music get less.

I guess there are two groups of people who listen to a lot of music:

1) young people

2) people who like music a lot.

So bad news for Taylor Swift AND obscure bands only interesting to enthusiasts. Not sure that's better overall. I would prefer a system that is regressive, that pays more for the first 1k listens than the last 1k - but that's definitely not fair :)

Look - I don't pretend I have the perfect formula, but as long as the money I give spotify go only the people I listen to in ratios that could be considered as just I am fine. There are many ways to tweak the payout, but it is the ideology behind it that seems to be fucked up right now.

Spotify would totally collapse if they were only earning $1 per user for unlimited streaming. I have no idea how I could make that profitable on any platform or with any hardware I know of. It’s not as though Spotify is practically free to run.

What practical difference does it make with aggregation / averages for millions of users compared to your system?

The difference is that your streaming actually has an impact on payouts. If you listen to 10 hours of an obscure genre with small and up and coming artists, they will currently micropennies, since your streams are dwarfed by the kid that listened to 150hrs of Taylor Swift a month.

It’s stacked against indie artists, towards large artists that get the vast majority of plays (and who probably have record deals ensuring that the labels get their blood)

I think it makes a big difference for the "long tail" who get almost nothing now, but could get a reasonable share of the dough if they could attract even a few hundred avid fans.

For example, I listen to <1hr of music a day, but it's a lot of Canadian Indie bands. My plays are completely swamped by teenagers listening to T.Swift or whatever on repeat for 8hrs a day so the bands I listen to get $10/month from Spotify as a whole.

That then smaller artists would be drowned by the popular ones. If I listen only to Vision Of Atlantis this month for 1 hour - I want them (or their label) to get all of my money after the Spotify cut. if you aggregate them in a huge pool with teen girls that listen to Tylor swift on repeat - there is chance that the minutes I have listen to them probably won't be enough to get that.