> Their system is basically "one big bucket of listens" - if your song gets listens, you get money. So if you pay your sub, and listen to say 5 niche musicians only, it still all goes mostly to the most popular songs.

That's basically how radio is accounted for in royalties, as well.

With Spotify knowing exactly who listened to what, it could be more precise (and arguably more susceptible to the fraud), but tbh what they do is standard (compulsory licensing) industry practice.

With radio, everyone that listens to a particular station is listening to roughly the same mix of songs, and they're "paying" (by listening to ads) on a per-hour basis.

If either of those was true with spotify, the unfairness would go away.

But when different listeners are paying very different amounts per hour, any correlation between payment amount and preferred content causes problems.