Whether that is the most ‘fair’ method or not, a pay per play model wouldn’t be the best for either listeners, artists, or streaming company.
There is always this challenge for creating a business model around digital goods; there is a non-zero cost to create the good, but there is a near zero cost per unit of the good.
No one is going to want a pay per listen model. The heaviest users aren’t going to want to pay that much and will likely turn to piracy, and the lightest users don’t have that strong a desire to listen to music (as demonstrated by their light usage) to want to pay for each stream.
The advantage of a single price, all you can stream, model is that it generates revenue for artists AND it properly recognizes the fact that each stream has a near zero unit cost.
In my model, each listener generates a fixed revenue that is divided up amongst all the artists who create something that user listens to in the same proportion that they listen to it.
There is always this challenge for creating a business model around digital goods; there is a non-zero cost to create the good, but there is a near zero cost per unit of the good.
No one is going to want a pay per listen model. The heaviest users aren’t going to want to pay that much and will likely turn to piracy, and the lightest users don’t have that strong a desire to listen to music (as demonstrated by their light usage) to want to pay for each stream.
The advantage of a single price, all you can stream, model is that it generates revenue for artists AND it properly recognizes the fact that each stream has a near zero unit cost.
In my model, each listener generates a fixed revenue that is divided up amongst all the artists who create something that user listens to in the same proportion that they listen to it.