You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music Highlight

On the whole, if more-active listeners listen to more-popular artists, then the pro rata scheme will be regressive in the economic (and social) sense, compared to the user-centric one, taxing the less-popular artists to consolidate wealth in the most-popular. Whereas if more-active listeners tend to listen to less-popular artists, then the pro rata scheme will be progressive, redistributing money from more-popular artists to less-popular ones. Thus this very basic question can be answered quantitatively by computing the average number of monthly streams per Spotify listener, and then calculating the average monthly total plays per artist of the artists played by listeners with fewer streams than that vs the ones with more. A ratio greater than 1.0 shows that pro rata is regressive, a ratio less than 1.0 shows that it’s progressive, and either way it does so without revealing any remotely-proprietary actual counts or averages. When I monitored it at Spotify, it hovered around 0.83. More-active-than-average listeners play artists who are, on average, 0.83x as popular as the artists played by less-active-than-average listeners. The averages vary considerably across countries, and a little bit over time, and thus the ratio varies minorly in both dimensions as well, but not in magnitude or direction. Pro rata is progressive, and user-centric would be regressive.