Implementing a User-Centric Payment System in the Music Streaming Market : A Comparative Static Approach from User Data

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, which is currently the norm, an alternative payment system adopts a user-centric perspective and splits the subscription fee of each user among the artists they listen to proportionally to the number of streams. Using data provided by a leading music streaming platform in France from more than 140,000 unique users during six months (436 million streams), we study the static effects of a change in the remuneration model at different levels: artists, music genres, country of origin, type of provider, and vintage