Abstrakt
We study the consequences of the implementation of a new payment system in the music streaming market. Instead of pooling all the subscription revenues and remunerating artists according to their number of streams, an alternative payment system consists in adopting a user-centric perspective and splits the subscription fee of each user among the artists she listens to proportionally to the number of streams. Besides being fairer because it is more in line with each consumer’s preferences, such a new payment could impact three other dimensions of fairness in the music industry: the revenue yields from active vs. passive streams, the star system that exists despite success is known to be disconnected from the difference in talent, and the possible bias that exists in recommendation systems. Using data provided by a leading music streaming platform in France from more than 140,000 unique users during six months (427 million streams) we show that a user-centric payment system will not only be fairer because consumers’ choices will be better aligned with revenue sharing but also because a user-centric payment system (i) would favor active streams at the expense of passive ones, (ii) would reduce the advantage of superstars and (iii) would moderate the relative advantage of major labels in curated streams.