What Is Attention-Based Streaming Payment? User-Centric Royalties Explained
Attention-based payment is a streaming royalty model where each listener's subscription money is divided among the artists that listener actually played, in proportion to their listening time. It replaces the industry-standard pro-rata model, where all subscriber money is pooled platform-wide and divided by total streams.
The idea has gone by several names: user-centric payment (UCPS), fan-powered royalties, artist-centric models. This guide explains how each version works, what the evidence says, and how RAAYDR's implementation differs.
How does the standard pro-rata model work?
Every subscriber's fee goes into one pool. The pool is divided by total streams across the entire platform, and each artist is paid for their share of those total streams. The consequence: your money does not follow your listening. A subscriber who plays one independent artist all month still sends most of their fee to whoever dominated global streaming that month.
Pro-rata rewards scale. It is why an artist needs tens of thousands of monthly listeners before streaming resembles income, a calculation we work through in how many streams £1,000 takes.
How does user-centric payment work instead?
Each subscriber's money is ring-fenced to the artists they played. If you gave an artist 40% of your listening time this month, that artist gets 40% of your artist pool. Nothing you pay funds music you never listened to.
The model has been debated for over a decade, and pieces of it have reached the real world. SoundCloud introduced fan-powered royalties in 2021, paying eligible independent artists from their own listeners' revenue. Deezer spent years advocating user-centric payment and later launched an artist-centric model with Universal Music that reweights the pool toward professional artists and active listening. Studies, including work commissioned by France's Centre National de la Musique, generally found that pure user-centric redistribution shifts money modestly from the mega-streamed toward the middle, and reduces the impact of fraudulent mass streaming, though it does not by itself transform artist incomes on a platform where the pool per listener stays small.
That last finding matters, and it is why implementation details decide everything.
How does RAAYDR's attention-based model work?
RAAYDR is built user-centric from the ground up, with the amounts published rather than buried. A Day One pays £6.99 a month; the standard price is £9.99. After tax, publishing royalties and card fees, 55% of every subscription flows to artists based on that fan's listening share, up to 15% is ring fenced for tastemakers, and RAAYDR keeps 30%. That is up to £3.57 per fan a month to artists on the standard tier, up to £2.46 on the Day One tier.
A worked example. A fan gives you 40% of their listening this month. On the standard tier you earn 40% of their per-fan share, about £1.43 from that one fan this month. Five hundred fans at that attention share is roughly £714 a month, about £8,568 a year. The same fan behaviour on a pro-rata platform is worth roughly £48 a month.
Three design choices push against the "modest redistribution" finding from earlier studies. The artist pool per fan is fixed and visible, so it cannot be quietly diluted. Attention is measured in listening time, not stream counts, which blunts the click-farm economics that plague per-stream models. And curation is funded separately, so tastemakers do not compete with artists for the same money.
Is attention-based payment fairer?
It is more honest, which is the better claim. Fairness arguments cut many ways, and mega-artists have a case that scale should pay. What user-centric payment guarantees is alignment: the money a fan spends supports the music that fan values. Whether that is "fair" is philosophy. That it is what most listeners already assume happens with their subscription is just fact, and surveys on the topic have repeatedly found listeners prefer it once the difference is explained.
FAQ
- What is the difference between user-centric and artist-centric payment?
- User-centric divides each listener's money among the artists that listener played. Artist-centric, the Deezer and Universal model, keeps a shared pool but reweights it, boosting professional artists and active listening. User-centric changes whose money goes where; artist-centric changes who the pool favours.
- Does any major platform use fully user-centric payment?
- No major platform has adopted it wholesale. SoundCloud's fan-powered royalties apply it to eligible independent artists, and RAAYDR is built on it natively. The majors remain pro-rata or artist-centric variants.
- Why haven't Spotify and Apple switched?
- Publicly cited reasons include contractual complexity with rights holders and studies suggesting modest average redistribution. Structurally, pro-rata also favours the largest catalogue owners, who negotiate the licences.
- Does attention-based payment stop streaming fraud?
- It reduces the economics of it. Under pro-rata, a bot farm streams into a giant shared pool and drains everyone. Under attention-based payment, a fraudulent account only redirects its own small artist pool, capping the damage per account.
- Where can I see what I would earn under this model?
- The calculator at raaydr.com lets artists, producers, songwriters and tastemakers model earnings from fan count and attention share.
Platform descriptions reflect publicly available information as of July 2026. RAAYDR mechanics are from our published model.
