Guest
Rasmus Rex
Rasmus Rex is Associate professor at Roskilde University, as introduced on the show.
Episodes (1)
Rasmus Rex of Roskilde University explains how pro-rata streaming royalties favor heavy listeners and why a user-centric model could cut fraud.
Questions these episodes answer
How does the pro-rata streaming royalty model actually split money?
Under pro-rata, a platform like Spotify pools all subscription revenue each month, keeps about 30 percent for itself, and splits the remaining 70 percent among rights holders according to their share of total streams that month, so every stream counts the same regardless of who paid for it.
From: Unpacking the User-Centric Distribution Model in Music Streaming
Why do artists with devoted niche fan bases earn so little from streaming?
The host raises artists who sell hundreds of concert tickets to diehard fans but see almost nothing from streaming. Rex explains the mechanism behind it: pro-rata rewards whoever gets listened to a lot of times regardless of fan depth, so a much bigger audience of casual listeners can outweigh a small but devoted one.
From: Unpacking the User-Centric Distribution Model in Music Streaming
Why does background listening music do well under the current royalty model?
Rex uses minimalist piano playlists as an example: they are not typically major-label content, but they perform well under pro-rata because a listener puts one on and lets it run for hours while working, generating heavy stream counts for every artist included on it.
From: Unpacking the User-Centric Distribution Model in Music Streaming
Why hasn't the industry switched to user-centric royalty payouts yet?
Rex says the transition is stuck because switching models does not create new money, it only redistributes existing money, so a streaming platform would need every rights holder to agree to new contracts at once, and any major label or publisher that stands to lose can block the whole change.
From: Unpacking the User-Centric Distribution Model in Music Streaming
How would a user-centric model reduce streaming fraud?
Rex explains that under pro-rata, someone can upload obscure music they own and use click farms to stream it, drawing real money out of the shared revenue pool paid by every listener. Under a user-centric model, that same fraud would only reshuffle the fraudster's own subscription fee minus the platform's cut, making it unprofitable.
From: Unpacking the User-Centric Distribution Model in Music Streaming