I read his "...grow total payments to artists" as saying "We'd really love to cut out these leeching industry licensing incumbent middlemen and pay you directly

I read his "...grow total payments to artists" as saying "We'd really love to cut out these leeching industry licensing incumbent middlemen and pay you directly." In other words, Pandora can indeed reduce their payout and provide more money to artists by changing the size of the pie slices: eliminate the RIAA, ASCAP, BMI, etc slices.