The counter is also true that A1 gets money from people who have no idea A1 even exists. It's hard to say if one method is better or worse for the smaller artist. Basically, is it better to get a bigger piece of a much smaller pie or smaller piece of a much bigger pie. Without the data it's hard to know.

EDIT

I'll also add that the big name artists have value beyond the number of streams. A platform without Taylor Swift will have less overall users, less money for the royalty pool, less money for platform development, etc...

An interesting thought idea would be to create a streaming platform which only has artists outside the top..50? and see how it does.

Meanwhile U2-U99999 pay money towards A1 without having listened to them

I tried to pick a simple scenario to make it easy to see the faulty model, and assume that this version of Spotify has exactly two users and a catalog of exactly two artists.

The imbalance remains even if you scale it up. Artists that are listened to by users that listen to less than the average number of streams are underpaid in relation to the revenue they generate for Spotify.