Spotify uses a weighted average - you can't abuse the system like that. The tough reality is that 10k fans paying $10 a month and spending 1% time listening to an indie artist only works out to $1k / month even if all the money went to the artists. Unfortunately that's not the case - Spotify has overhead, artists sign with labels and other middlemen creep in.

As a result artists make pennies. The only way to change this is to get consumers to pay drastically more but that's what killed iTunes in the first place.