Whether that is the most ‘fair’ method or not, a pay per play model wouldn’t be the best for either listeners, artists, or streaming company.

There is always this challenge for creating a business model around digital goods; there is a non-zero cost to create the good, but there is a near zero cost per unit of the good.

No one is going to want a pay per listen model. The heaviest users aren’t going to want to pay that much and will likely turn to piracy, and the lightest users don’t have that strong a desire to listen to music (as demonstrated by their light usage) to want to pay for each stream.

The advantage of a single price, all you can stream, model is that it generates revenue for artists AND it properly recognizes the fact that each stream has a near zero unit cost.

In my model, each listener generates a fixed revenue that is divided up amongst all the artists who create something that user listens to in the same proportion that they listen to it.