Two Models, Wildly Different Payouts
Every month, streaming platforms collect a massive pool of subscription and ad revenue. The question that should matter most to every working musician is simple: how does that money get divided? Right now, two competing models are fighting for dominance, and the one your platform uses can mean the difference between a livable income and pocket change.
The pro rata model has been the default since streaming began. Fan centric (sometimes called user centric) is the challenger. Deezer made the switch in 2023, and the rest of the industry has been watching closely ever since. Here's what both models actually mean for your royalty checks.
How the Pro Rata Model Works
Under pro rata, all subscription revenue goes into one giant pool. Your share of that pool is determined by your percentage of total streams on the entire platform. If your songs made up 0.001% of all streams that month, you get 0.001% of the royalty pool.
Sounds fair on the surface. The problem is that it completely disconnects your listeners from your earnings. Say a fan pays $10.99 per month and listens exclusively to your music. Under pro rata, their subscription fee doesn't go to you. It goes into the shared pool, where most of it flows to whoever had the biggest hits that month.
That means your dedicated superfan's money is effectively subsidizing Drake, Taylor Swift, and Bad Bunny. Even if those superfans never listen to mainstream pop.
Who Benefits From Pro Rata
Artists with massive stream counts win under this system. If you're pulling hundreds of millions of streams per month, the pro rata model is incredibly generous because you're drawing from the entire subscriber base, not just your own listeners.
It also benefits artists whose music gets played passively on playlists. Those ambient, lo fi, and "chill beats" playlists that people leave running for hours? Each of those streams counts the same as an intentional play from a dedicated fan. Under pro rata, a 30 second skip past a track on a mood playlist is worth the same as a full listen from someone who bought a ticket to your show.
How the Fan Centric Model Works
Fan centric flips the entire logic. Instead of pooling all revenue together, each subscriber's payment gets divided among only the artists they personally listened to that month.
Back to our example: if a fan pays $10.99 and listens to 10 artists, their subscription gets split among those 10 artists based on listening time. Your superfan who only listens to you? Their full subscription share goes to you.
This creates a direct financial connection between listeners and the artists they care about. The money follows the fan.
Who Benefits From Fan Centric
Independent and mid tier artists with dedicated fanbases come out ahead. If you have 5,000 loyal listeners who actively choose your music, the fan centric model makes sure their money reaches you instead of disappearing into a pool dominated by global superstars.
Niche genres benefit enormously too. A jazz artist whose fans listen deeply and repeatedly gets properly compensated for that engagement. Under pro rata, those same fans' subscriptions would mostly flow to pop and hip hop artists who dominate total stream counts.
Deezer's own data from their first year on the fan centric model showed that professional artists with active, engaged fanbases saw payouts increase by up to 20%. That's not a small bump.
The Real World Numbers
Let's make this concrete. Imagine an independent artist with 30,000 monthly listeners on a platform with 100 million total subscribers.
Under pro rata: Your 30,000 listeners might generate 500,000 streams. If the platform had 80 billion total streams that month, your share of the pool is 0.000625%. On a $500 million royalty pool, that's about $3,125.
Under fan centric: Those same 30,000 listeners each contribute a portion of their subscription directly to you based on how much they listened. If the average listener spent 8% of their listening time on your music, and each subscription contributes roughly $7 to the royalty pool after the platform's cut, your earnings would be closer to $4,200.
That's a 34% increase from the exact same number of listeners and streams. The difference comes entirely from how the math works. You can model these scenarios yourself with our Spotify royalty calculator or compare earnings across all major platforms.
Which Platforms Use Which Model
Pro rata (the current default): Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and Tidal all use the pro rata system. This is still the industry standard, though several platforms have explored alternatives.
Fan centric: Deezer is the only major platform that has fully implemented fan centric payments, launching their Artist Centric Payment System (ACPS) in late 2023. It combines user centric allocation with bonuses for professionally created music and active listening (as opposed to passive or background streams).
Spotify has publicly studied user centric models and even ran internal simulations. Their conclusion was that the shift would primarily redistribute money between genres rather than dramatically changing the overall picture. Critics argue that Spotify's analysis was too focused on aggregate data and missed the impact on individual mid tier artists who would benefit most.
Tidal experimented with direct artist payments and fan centered features under its previous ownership, though it hasn't fully adopted the model platform wide.
The Arguments Against Fan Centric
It's not a perfect system. The biggest practical challenge is complexity. Pro rata is simple math: divide the pool by total streams. Fan centric requires tracking every individual subscriber's listening habits and allocating their payment accordingly. That's a much heavier technical lift.
There's also the "power listener" problem. Some subscribers stream music 12 hours a day, while others listen for 20 minutes on their commute. Under fan centric, the heavy listener's subscription gets spread thin across hundreds of artists, meaning each artist gets fractions of a cent. Meanwhile, the casual listener's money concentrates on just a few artists, potentially overpaying per stream.
Major labels have also been skeptical. Their catalogs dominate the pro rata pool, and any shift toward fan centric would likely redirect money away from their biggest earners toward independent artists. That's a hard sell when the three majors control roughly 60% of all streams.
What Deezer's Experiment Tells Us
After more than two years on the fan centric model, Deezer's results are telling. Fraud streams dropped significantly because fake streams from bot accounts no longer drain the entire pool. Under pro rata, a fraudster generating millions of fake streams steals from every artist. Under fan centric, they can only steal from the specific accounts they control, which limits the damage and makes fraud easier to detect.
Professional artists (those who meet Deezer's threshold of 500 streams from 50 unique listeners per month) saw their per stream rates hold steady or increase. Artists below that threshold saw lower rates, which Deezer argues is by design: the system prioritizes real music over noise uploads and white noise tracks that game the pro rata model.
Check how your current Deezer streams translate to earnings to see where you stand.
What Artists Should Actually Do About This
Regardless of which model wins out, the strategic takeaway is the same: build a real fanbase. Artists who rely on playlist placement and passive streams are betting on the pro rata model continuing forever. Artists who build genuine listener relationships will benefit under either system, and will benefit significantly more if the industry shifts toward fan centric.
Some concrete steps:
- Distribute to Deezer specifically. It's the one major platform where fan centric is already live. If your audience skews European (Deezer is strong in France, Germany, and Brazil), you're leaving money on the table by ignoring it.
- Focus on repeat listeners over raw stream counts. A thousand fans who listen to your album on repeat are worth more than 100,000 one time playlist streams under the fan centric model.
- Diversify across platforms. Use our Apple Music and YouTube Music calculators to compare what you'd earn on each platform, and make sure your music is available everywhere.
- Track your per stream rates monthly. If you notice your rates dropping on pro rata platforms, that's the pool getting diluted by more artists and more streams. Fan centric insulates you from that dilution.
Where This Is Heading
The momentum is clearly moving toward some version of fan centric payments. Deezer proved it's technically possible at scale. SoundCloud's fan powered royalties (their version of the same idea) showed strong artist support. The question isn't really if other platforms will adopt elements of this model, but when and how aggressively.
Spotify's recent moves to penalize fraud streams and require minimum thresholds are baby steps in the fan centric direction, even if they haven't changed the core payment model. Apple Music's higher per stream rate already partially reflects a more premium, engaged listener base.
For independent artists, this trend is overwhelmingly positive. The streaming economy has historically rewarded scale over loyalty. Fan centric payments flip that equation, and every artist building a genuine career should be paying attention.
Want to see how your current streams translate into real earnings? Run your numbers through our streaming royalty calculators for every major platform. And if you need a reliable distributor to get your music everywhere, get 7% off DistroKid here.
