A stream from Nigeria pays an artist 1/20th of a stream from the UK, but the pro-rata model hides this by pooling all revenue together

Spotify Premium costs $0.81/month in Nigeria and $15.95/month in the UK. Apple Music is $0.62/month in Nigeria versus $14.62/month in the UK. Under the pro-rata royalty model, all subscription revenue from all countries is pooled together, and each stream's value is determined by dividing the total pool by total global streams. This means that the massive and rapidly growing listener bases in countries like Nigeria, India, Brazil, and Indonesia — where subscription prices are a fraction of Western rates — are diluting the per-stream value for every artist on the platform. As streaming adoption grows fastest in developing economies (which is where most of the world's population growth and internet adoption is happening), the average per-stream payout trends downward even as total platform revenue grows. For an independent artist based in Lagos whose fanbase is predominantly Nigerian, this creates a devastating economic reality. Their 100,000 monthly streams generate roughly $300-$400 — compared to $400-$700 for the same stream count from a predominantly US/UK audience. The artist has no control over where their listeners are located, no ability to price-discriminate, and no transparency into the geographic breakdown of their royalty calculations. Spotify for Artists shows total streams by country, but the per-stream rate by country is not disclosed to artists. An artist cannot even calculate what they should be earning, because the formula is opaque. Meanwhile, African, South Asian, and Latin American artists are building massive audiences in the fastest-growing music markets on Earth — and being paid as if those audiences are worth a fraction of Western listeners. This persists because the pro-rata model is the path of least resistance for platforms. Calculating and disclosing country-level per-stream rates would expose the magnitude of the disparity and create political pressure to address it. Subscription pricing in developing markets is deliberately low to drive adoption and market share — platforms are trading per-user revenue for total addressable market size. The cost of this growth strategy is externalized onto artists, who bear the dilution without any say in pricing decisions. A user-centric payment model (where each subscriber's fee goes only to artists they actually listen to) would partially address this by ensuring that a Nigerian subscriber's $0.81 goes to Nigerian artists rather than being pooled and diluted. But no major platform except SoundCloud has adopted user-centric payments, because the pro-rata model favors major labels whose catalogs dominate global streaming — and those labels are the platforms' most powerful business partners.