Will and should streaming services turn to user-centric music payouts?

User-centric payout is a different way of distributing streaming royalties to the current ‘pro-rata’ system. MusicAlly explains: If an artist (Moses Sumney, say) got 1% of the streams in that period, then his rightsholders get 1% of the royalties pool. But what that also means is essentially 1% of the royalties generated by every individual subscriber are going to Moses Sumney’s music, even if they didn’t listen to him at all. In user-centric model, for each listener, the royalties portion of their subscription is divided only among the rightsholders of the artists they listen to. If they’re a hardcore metaller, folk or classical fan, that’s where the royalties go. If they only listen to Moses Sumney, his music secures 100% of the loot. Whether smaller artists make more money and big artists make less in this system is not always clear.