I think it's fair enough, and I bet it'd make very little difference to the success of the vast majority of artists if they changed

I don't understand the difference in your two propositions, since money is fungible : whether the ratio is established globally or customer per customer, the end result would be the same, wouldn't it ? Unless there are specific calculation rules ?

If I pay $10/month to Spotify and play 2 artists 20 times each over the month, then each artists should get $5. Ignore Spotify fees for this example.

What Spotify actually does is give these two artists some cents per play. Let’s say $0.01 per play, they each get $0.20 from my subscription and the rest of my $10 goes to Spotify.

Yes, but this argument isn't based on how people actually listen to music.

It's really unclear whether an artist-centric model would make any real difference to artists - under an artist-centric model the more an individual user streams the less the artists get per stream, so if you have a small number of fans who listen to you a LOT the artist-centric model means you get less money

I believe they actually see that 0.000001% of all plays went to your artist, so 0.000001% of all money goed to that artist. This means if you listened to 1 song this month, they do receive way less than 10$. (Because number of streams does not fluctuate much you can probably give it a $ per stream)

I agree 100% but it's not really up to spotify - it was the rights holders who wanted it that way. Some label execs have come out in favor of the user-centric model, but as long as some labels make more money off the per-stream model, they will block the change. I believe spotify themselves would prefer the user-centric model, as it would alleviate their fraud-bot problem.

This exactly, and it is not often enough mentioned when there are protests in the newss. Big record companies get more money if smaller artists get less money. So anything that is ‘more fair to (smaller/indie) artists’ is worse for record companies and they hold the cards.

same here, but its inevitable and i have accepted it as the price to be able to stram all the word's music from the comfort of my phone.

That's why we are building MyPie (mypie.app) to allow fans like us to reward the artists they stream only. Check it out we are in open beta right now.

"All the world's music" is a bit much. As a metalhead and extreme music fan, Spotify has gigantic holes. Pretty sure it's the same for anyone with taste reaching in the truly obscure.

And don't get me started on labels only lending their shitty remasters to streaming services.