The difference is that your streaming actually has an impact on payouts. If you listen to 10 hours of an obscure genre with small and up and coming artists, they will currently micropennies, since your streams are dwarfed by the kid that listened to 150hrs of Taylor Swift a month.

It’s stacked against indie artists, towards large artists that get the vast majority of plays (and who probably have record deals ensuring that the labels get their blood)

I think it makes a big difference for the "long tail" who get almost nothing now, but could get a reasonable share of the dough if they could attract even a few hundred avid fans.

For example, I listen to <1hr of music a day, but it's a lot of Canadian Indie bands. My plays are completely swamped by teenagers listening to T.Swift or whatever on repeat for 8hrs a day so the bands I listen to get $10/month from Spotify as a whole.

That then smaller artists would be drowned by the popular ones. If I listen only to Vision Of Atlantis this month for 1 hour - I want them (or their label) to get all of my money after the Spotify cut. if you aggregate them in a huge pool with teen girls that listen to Tylor swift on repeat - there is chance that the minutes I have listen to them probably won't be enough to get that.