The harder question is does everyone get paid the same per view. If i only listen to one song, does that artist get the $5 from my monthly subscription? If I view a 1000 things in a month, do they all get $0.005? It gets hard to put a value on a listen. Is it maybe $0.10? Well over an hour that is $2 and I can get audio cheaper elsewhere. I think you have to have tiers where each month you get X credits (partial rollover?) and then that is what the artist gets paid. Allow people to upgrade to higher levels on the fly
The sibling reply points to discover and unknowns getting any views at all. I think that is solvable with a different model. People who are unknown essentially "advertise" with the platform at the cost of 2 "views". People who listen to the unknown's song essentially earn two more views. And they might play that song later and the artist gets paid back essentially.
You take x seconds listened that month, and distribute to artists a, b and c.
As a nice easter egg, I mean distributivity in the mathematical sense. y.x = y.(seconds(a) + seconds(b) + seconds(c)) = y.seconds(a) + y.seconds(b) + y.seconds(c). And y = subscription amount per month / total seconds.
The alternative is of course to take x amount of songs listened to, but this does not distribute over minutes.
I guess you can have a hybrid approach too. If the song is >10 minutes it counts as two songs, or maybe you have a continuous scale. All of the above is better for me than what Spotify does. Even better, let the paying customer decide.
But I agree that finding new artists is tricky. You can pay people to listen to your music in the hope that they later go back to listen to that music when you aren't paying them anymore.
The sibling reply points to discover and unknowns getting any views at all. I think that is solvable with a different model. People who are unknown essentially "advertise" with the platform at the cost of 2 "views". People who listen to the unknown's song essentially earn two more views. And they might play that song later and the artist gets paid back essentially.