In any given period of time some people are going to listen to the same tracks multiple times. For example, on many radio stations the selection of music is really quite small, and the majority of airtime is occupied by less than 100 songs. If people are repeatedly listening to those songs then why shouldn't the artist that created them receive compensation proportionate to the number of plays the song received? I couldn't find data on Spotify users' listening habits, but here's my own, sorted descending by track plays, for example: http://www.last.fm/user/GarrettGrimsley/library/tracks
If everyone listened to the same amount of tracks, they would receive the exact same amount of compensation as they do now.
My suggestion (which has been raised by others many times), is that if a user listens to 1000 tracks/month, their listens should be worth 10x less than a user who only listens to 100 tracks/month, since they are both paying Spotify the same amount.
I'm not sure if it would result in very meaningful distinction in how much artists are actually compensated (maybe it would negatively harm smaller artists because, hypothetically, they are listened to more by people who listen to lots of music).
I'm actually pretty curious about why they have chosen to stick with this model, since the alternative I've described is pretty obvious and has been proposed many times.
I would say that there is more value in songs that are actively selected vs just played automatically (e.g. I often go to an artist's page, select a specific song, then let the playlist play without me paying much attention), but I don't know if that's really an economically meaningful distinction.
Flattr works like that. I found it made me, as a low volume user, very concious about what I click on.
If Spotify made the change I would probably think more about what I listen to. Perhaps even use a second non-paid account for certain listening. But I might be a minority.
I would suggest yet another model: payment per unique listeners per day (or week, or month). It wouldn't be a big step from their current model but would be a lot less gameable.
I thought you were saying to drop compensation for repeated tracks. It looks like you're suggesting the payout be for each song be calculated as
Subscription fee - Spotify's take
--------------------------------------------- = Compensation from 1 user
1 user's plays of song / User's total song plays
