> The business overhead of distributing payment this way is enormous. Right now, Spotify just runs a report that takes some top level numbers, splits them out by copyright owner and divides a single pool of money.
Unless they are doing something special, they are actually just taking a bucket of money and sending it to SoundExchange or ASCAP/BMI (for the US at least) and letting the do the actual distribution. ASCAP/BMI are very used to distributing payments based on plays (they do it for radio, concerts, etc.).
It would really just be a matter of including the play counts for each song every month.
Unless they are doing something special, they are actually just taking a bucket of money and sending it to SoundExchange or ASCAP/BMI (for the US at least) and letting the do the actual distribution. ASCAP/BMI are very used to distributing payments based on plays (they do it for radio, concerts, etc.).
It would really just be a matter of including the play counts for each song every month.