[aston]

Here's the simplest way to understand where your money goes (assuming you're a subscriber, otherwise where the ad revenue earned on your eyeballs goes): For each song you stream, that artist gets a fixed fraction of a cent. Unless you listen to an atypically large number of hours of music each month, there will be leftover money. That remaining money goes into a pot allocated across every artist on the streaming service in proportion to their total number of streams.

So, roughly, the policy as it stands pays the biggest artists—or, really, the labels of the biggest artists—more money. Those big artists and labels are powerful enough that the chance such a change will be made is basically nil.

The reality is a little more complicated because the fixed per-stream rate is set based on the total number of streams, but to a first order approximation this is it.