That's not what a dropkick is. In a similar way to someone else pushed a cat, the man used his foot to move the cat away from the floor, but because of the zero-g, it caused the cat to move to the ceiling. Hardly unethical.

"Audible would pay out a royalty whenever a code was redeemed."

From the article, this is what the step 5 should be. They would just redeem the codes for free and then get paid.

Slightly different. Example if the service only has 2 users:

I listen to artist A's song 1 time, you listen to artist B's song 9 times. We listen to no other songs for the month.

With pooling, A gets 10% of the money, B get's 10% of the money.

With their suggestion, they each get 50%