One controversial study out of Finland, published in November last year and co-authored by multiple local music trade orgs, has sparked squabbles over this topic. Its key finding? In Spotify’s existing pro rata system, songs recorded by the top 0.4 percent of artists (in terms of overall popularity) got 9.9 percent of the money. However, when the “user-centric” system was hypothetically applied, those 0.4 percent of artists would have received just 5.6 percent of the total cash.
