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

The way most major music-streaming subscription services actually pay is through a simpler mathematical scheme that works like this: The service puts all the money from all the people for a whole month into one big pool, and then splits that pool up according to the total streaming that happened that month. This scheme is called pro rata, from the Latin 'pro' meaning 'professional', and 'rata' meaning 'way to avoid having to print 400 million individual billing statements'. (The model where your personal money is split up amongst your personal artists is called user-centric, which sounds simpler because it isn’t Latin for anything.)