I think there should be a music service that works exactly like Spotify / Apple Music / Google Music but with these differences:
1. No free tier
2. Your views determine which artists get your money.
AFAIK all of the above mentioned services pool views and give your money to the artists with the most overall views. If I listen exclusively to Scatman John's Scatman's World then I would have expected his estate to get all my money minus maybe 5% admin fees.
The harder question is does everyone get paid the same per view. If i only listen to one song, does that artist get the $5 from my monthly subscription? If I view a 1000 things in a month, do they all get $0.005? It gets hard to put a value on a listen. Is it maybe $0.10? Well over an hour that is $2 and I can get audio cheaper elsewhere. I think you have to have tiers where each month you get X credits (partial rollover?) and then that is what the artist gets paid. Allow people to upgrade to higher levels on the fly
The sibling reply points to discover and unknowns getting any views at all. I think that is solvable with a different model. People who are unknown essentially "advertise" with the platform at the cost of 2 "views". People who listen to the unknown's song essentially earn two more views. And they might play that song later and the artist gets paid back essentially.
You take x seconds listened that month, and distribute to artists a, b and c.
As a nice easter egg, I mean distributivity in the mathematical sense. y.x = y.(seconds(a) + seconds(b) + seconds(c)) = y.seconds(a) + y.seconds(b) + y.seconds(c). And y = subscription amount per month / total seconds.
The alternative is of course to take x amount of songs listened to, but this does not distribute over minutes.
I guess you can have a hybrid approach too. If the song is >10 minutes it counts as two songs, or maybe you have a continuous scale. All of the above is better for me than what Spotify does. Even better, let the paying customer decide.
But I agree that finding new artists is tricky. You can pay people to listen to your music in the hope that they later go back to listen to that music when you aren't paying them anymore.
i think the downside to this would simply be that up & coming artists would be paid near 0. i'm not sure how spread out the money is on spotify and the rest, but i'm guessing if it's listen based payments (similar to youtube view based payments), then there will be an extremely disproportional amount of people getting pennies and other labels getting millions upon millions. although, maybe that's how it is today, regardless?
I actually had to explain this to people that listen to my music. I get ~$0 per month from Spotify and when I told this to one of my friends (who listens to my music) they were like: "But I pay $10 a month!".
Then I had to explain that all the subscribers on the whole platform get pooled together.
1. No free tier
2. Your views determine which artists get your money.
AFAIK all of the above mentioned services pool views and give your money to the artists with the most overall views. If I listen exclusively to Scatman John's Scatman's World then I would have expected his estate to get all my money minus maybe 5% admin fees.