Your method would only increase complexity for Spotify and serve no real purpose in terms of getting your favorite artists more money.
Your method would only increase complexity for Spotify and serve no real purpose in terms of getting your favorite artists more money.
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.
Things are not so simple.
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.
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.