The payout per play is basically different between free and premium users as they add more to the revenue shared by all the artists.
If you look at revenue for premium users, then it's probably much higher than that, but when you add free users, it will lower the average.
A solution you might think would be to remove the free-tier. But that will only do one thing: cut a (admittedly smaller) revenue stream for artists, cut a promotional stream for artists and less possibilities to upsale premium accounts to free users.
Someone who isn't even a free user will either not listen to music or pirate it. Is that preferable?
A lot of artists admit that Spotify pay-out per stream is certainly lower, but it's still dominating all the other streaming revenues, as long as you are actually an artist who has the potential to make any. Some unknown artist selling 1 CD for $10 on bandcamp with no listen on streaming services will probably think differently.
I remember a (deleted) tweet from the rapper Nipsey Hussle where he posted his payout breakdown. It's been reblogged since deletion and is preserved:
>ATTENTION EVERYONE:
>
>1 Million Streams on YouTube = $690
>
>1 Million Streams on Spotify = $4,370
>
>1 Million Streams on Apple Music = $7,350
>
>1 Million Streams on @Tidal = $12,500
>
>1 Million Streams on Amazon Music = $4,020
>
>Don’t shoot the messenger.
>Jus Sign up 4 @tidal
>
>— THA GREAT (@NipseyHussle) January 15, 2018
The only thing about payout $ is that you have to take into account how many streams you actually get on each service. Are we to believe that Tidal's payouts would stay they same if they had Spotify's much greater listenership? Or Apple for that matter? Streaming services pay the rates charged to them by the record companies based on myriad listenership demographics.
I believe the labels are charging the services, and those labels pay the artist. Am I wrong on that? The labels set the price to be paid, don't they?
Quote: "Early last month, the US Copyright Board (CRB) officially ruled in favor of a 44% increase on streaming music royalties for songwriters and publishers."
Care to guess how much of those services' content comes from publishers (read: labels), and how much those services already pay to them (hint: as much as 70% of their revenue)?
Also, strangely enough, the article quotes everyone except Spotify, Amazon etc. But is happily quoting .... (substitute expletives) various music vultures^W associations who directly benefit from this arrangement (and not the songwriters).
I mean, of all companies, Spotify. Their whole business model is built upon not playing fair with content creators.