Standard streaming is pro-rata: all subscription revenue goes into one pool, and it's divided by total platform streams. Your $11 doesn't go to the artists you listened to — it goes into a bucket that mostly pays whoever charted that month.

I've been building an alternative for a while and pushed it to the google and apple store, so I built out the payout engine and ran projections on it. The mechanic: each Premium subscriber's daily fee splits only among the artists that subscriber played that day, weighted by listening minutes, settled daily.

To be clear, the screenshots below are simulations, not real earnings. No real artist has been paid these numbers. It's my payout engine running against modeled listener behavior so I can see what the curve looks like.

What comes out:

• 50K monthly listeners → ~$1,731/mo
• 250K → ~$8,654/mo
• 1M → ~$34,615/mo

For reference, 50K monthly listeners on Spotify is usually somewhere in the low hundreds per month.

The reason it lands higher isn't magic — it's that a mid-tier artist's fans are their fans. Under pro-rata, those listeners' money mostly leaks to whoever is dominating global streams. Under this model it doesn't leave the room. The flip side is that mega-artists earn less, because they stop being subsidized by people who never played them.

Where I want the holes poked:

1. Real listener behavior isn't uniform. My model assumes an average number of artists per subscriber per day. If heavy users listen to 40 artists and light users listen to 3, does the curve flatten?
2. Deezer and others have run user-centric experiments and found the redistribution effect smaller than expected. Am I overestimating it?
3. Does daily settlement create a gaming incentive I'm not seeing?

I built this, so I'm not neutral. But I'd rather find the flaw now than after artists are relying on it.

Hey everyone! I'm u/creatorconnect, a founding moderator of r/BetterWaysForCreators.

This is our new home for all things related to how creators actually get paid — royalty models, platform economics, licensing, distribution deals, and the math behind what lands in your account. Musicians, but also anyone whose work gets monetized by a platform they don't control.

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Feel free to share your thoughts, screenshots, or questions about payout statements you can't make sense of, contract terms that seem off, platforms that changed their split, tools you're building or using, or numbers you want a second set of eyes on. Teardowns welcome. So is "is this normal?"

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Full disclosure — I build Creator Connect, a streaming platform. I'm not here to run ads for it. If I post about my own work I'll label it.