The penny-per-stream bill gets the money right and the mechanism wrong

"A penny per stream" is the best slogan musicians have had in the streaming era. It is also a promise no pool-based system can keep, including the one in the bill that carries it. The fight worth having is over how much money goes into the pot and how it is split, not over a rate.

The news hook

In September we explained that Spotify doesn't pay per stream: it divides each country's monthly royalty pool by share of streams, and the "rate" is worked out afterwards. Spotify puts it flatly: "No service pays a fixed amount per stream because listeners don't pay per stream either" (Spotify). We ended that piece by saying the rate is the wrong lever.

The strongest objection to that comes from musicians themselves, so this column takes it on.

The best case for a rate

In March 2024, Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman introduced the Living Wage for Musicians Act, written with the United Musicians and Allied Workers union. Its stated aim is to pay artists "at a penny per stream", against what the sponsors put as Spotify's average of about $0.003 (Tlaib's office).

Put the argument at full strength. "Streamshare" is a description that makes low pay sound like physics. Spotify chooses its prices, its bundles and its two-thirds payout (Spotify); the pool is small because of decisions, not nature. A rate is something a worker can understand, organise around and check against a statement. Every other wage campaign names a number, and "a penny" turns an opaque formula into a demand anyone can repeat. Telling artists to stop talking about rates, on this view, is telling them to argue on the platforms' terms.

We think that's right about the politics and right that the pool is a choice.

Where the argument stops

Read how the bill would actually pay. It would tax providers' non-subscription revenues, add "a small fee" to subscriptions, and send the money to a non-profit fund that would "pay artists in proportion to their monthly streams", with "a maximum payout per track per month" (Tlaib's office; MusicTech).

"In proportion to their monthly streams" is streamshare. The fund is a second pool, split the same way as Spotify's. So the penny is a target, not a price: if listening grows faster than the fee and the tax, each stream is worth less than a cent, exactly as it is on Spotify today. Neither page we read gives the size of the fee or the tax, so we can't say whether the numbers would reach a cent at all.

That matters because a promised rate invites the wrong fixes. A true fixed price per play would pay out without limit for volume, and volume is the one thing fraud farms and bulk uploads can produce on demand. Spotify's own rules already lean the other way: a track needs 1,000 streams in 12 months to earn recorded royalties, "flagrant" artificial streaming draws a per-track charge, and noise tracks need two minutes to earn a stream, so they earn a fraction of what they did (Spotify). Spotify says the threshold leaves the size of the pool unchanged. Those are all rules about splitting a pool, and the bill's per-track cap is one too.

What we think

The bill's authors seem to know this, because the parts that would do the work aren't the penny. They are:

1. New money from outside the existing pool. A fee and a tax put more into the pot instead of fighting over the same two-thirds. That is the real raise, and it is the part to defend.
2. A cap per track per month. It stops the biggest hits taking an unlimited share of a fixed fund, which pushes money down the list. That is a split rule, and a better one than Spotify's 1,000-stream floor, which moves money up the list.
3. A fund outside the platforms. A non-profit paying artists directly sidesteps the label and distributor deals that, as our explainer showed, decide most of what an artist takes home.

So keep the campaign and change the pitch. Ask for a bigger pool and a fairer split, and name the cap. "A penny per stream" will be quoted back at artists the first month the fund pays out $0.006, and the platforms will say what they already say: there is no rate. Our view, as an inference from the bill's own design, is that its strongest form is an honest one: more money in, shared in a way that doesn't reward volume.