[ZoF]

I see your point, but I think your reasoning is flawed. If each one got 3.50$ from you then they would get nothing from the other subscribers, whereas, as it currently is they receive .00007 from everyone... Even if Spotify followed your subscription model the end result would be the same small amount of money.

Your method would only increase complexity for Spotify and serve no real purpose in terms of getting your favorite artists more money.

[d2vid]

If tweens listen to 10 hrs/day of Justin Bieber on repeat using free accounts, Bieber shouldn't get money from adults who listen a few hours a day to anything but him using premium accounts.

I think it's quite reasonable to assume that differences in listening and paying habits between users would NOT average out, and a per user split would be fairer.

[e12e]

I agree that a per person split would be might be better (for how I think royalties should be distributed) -- but one would also take into account the ad revenue those tweens (and other "free" users) generate.

I don't know how Spotify is doing financially, but hopefully they make money off free users as well as paid users (but I'd not be surprised if they end up a bit like Opera did -- making money from paid users and licensing/bundling deals -- and just using the commercial breaks/ads as stick to guide users towards the paid service).

Either way I'd much prefer being able to pay for lossless records that I get to keep -- I gave up on Spotify quite early as it ended up a little like youtube -- come back to a playlist after a few months and half the songs were gone. I know they're better now, but that experience just underlined the idea that paying for licensing content in a way that leaves you vulnerable to that content disappearing is a very bad deal for me as a listener/consumer.

[maccard]

Its interesting that you mention their ad breaks. For 6 months, I had no idea that spotify operated a premium service whatsoever, until they imposed the 2.5hr limit per week on my account and hit me with more ads. I subscribed immediately.

[bitJericho]

I think by broadening the pool they are effectively bringing more music to Spotify. This is good even if it's of the Bieber variety because then users like me can discover artists I wouldn't normally listen to or discover new CDs from artists that used to be in fashion and are no longer.

[Already__Taken]

in 5 years of such use by said tweens how many more users might be brought into the system. How many tweens parents a there accounts made for.

Things are not so simple.

[shalmanese]

Imagine you have 10 people who listen to artist A once every month and one person who listens to artist B 90 times.

Under the current spotify system, artist B would get 90% of the revenue and artist A would get 10%. Under the parent's proposal, artist A would get 89% of the revenue and artist B would get 11%.

In any case, I'm willing to bet that the parent's proposal would actually backfire. I would wager that people who listen to obscure music also listen to more music so they're actually receiving more under the original spotify proposal.

[dmbass]

Hmmm... I'll have to make a graph of that and see how it pans out.