> 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

> 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. If I'm understanding the first quoted paragraph correctly, the second is not necessarily the result. Say I'm paying $10/month to the streaming service and they pay $7/month to the artists no matter how much or how little I play. Whether or not the second paragraph holds depends on how they distribute that $7/month among artists. They could for example take that $7, divide it by the number of songs I listened to that month, and pay each artist I listened to that amount times the number of their songs I listened to. In that case the result would be that your described. Another way they could decide the value of a song is by taking the total amount they have to distribute, $7 x the number of subscribers, divided by the total number of songs listened to, and pay each artist that times the number of plays of their songs. Let's call that amount per play a share. In that case a person who only listens to one song a month and that song is a Swift song causes Swift to get one more share than She would have if they had not played any Swift songs. A person who listens to many Swift songs in a month causes here to get many more shares than she would have if they had listened to no Swift songs. The results is not what is described in your second paragraph.