When you buy an album, some of that money goes directly to the artist. But with streaming, the royalty breakdown works very differently: Subscription dollars go into one big pool and are doled out to artists based on how many times their songs are streamed across a given service. So even if you only listened to Purple Mountains all month, your subscription dollars will still end up lining the pocketbooks of Post Malone. It’s a little like the Electoral College, where a quick and dirty method of tallying represents a more complicated reality.

Whether to change the current system has been a matter of industry debate over the last several years. Spotify maintains that the current approach works better for more artists, but a recent announcement by the streaming service Deezer stands to put that theory to the test. Two years ago, the Paris-based company shared the news that it was working with record labels on a “user-centric” model for paying out royalties: compensating artists based on their share of each subscriber’s listening. (Or as one early advocate put it, “If I listen to Led Zeppelin 25 percent of the time, Led Zeppelin gets 25 percent of my money.”) It was unclear how this experiment was progressing until mid-September, when Deezer went public with more details about the new initiative, which it plans to test out in France early next year before potentially expanding it to other regions.

Given concerns that the streaming economy has disadvantaged niche artists, any change that promises to spread the industry’s wealth beyond the top 1 percent could be worth exploring. The biggest argument for a user-centric or “subscriber share” approach to royalty payouts is just that it’s equitable. “Some services may like to say it won’t make too much difference,” BMC CEO Hartwig Masuch contended, “but that does not matter as much as being able to tell artists, ‘This system is fair, and this is how it works.’”

The idea itself isn’t new, but supporters of a user-centric approach now also have at least a little data on their side. A 2017 study based on Spotify Premium subscribers in Finland found that currently, about 10 percent of royalty revenue went to the top 0.4 percent of artists. Under a pay-per-user policy, only 5.6 percent of revenues went to those same stars, with more revenue being distributed among musicians with fewer streams.

Another argument in favor of the user-centric model is that it might help fight click fraud. As it stands, online bots and dedicated fan campaigns can game the system by streaming an artist’s music continuously, potentially handing their favorite stars an outsized share of royalties. It wouldn’t work that way if artists were paid based on a percentage of each user’s listening habits. “You could never get back more than you put in,” was how Annabell Coldrick, CEO of the UK-based Music Managers Forum, succinctly put it. Deezer, too, promotes fraud prevention as one of the reasons for the new payment system.

Spotify’s chief economist, Will Page, has raised a couple of points in defense of the existing model. Under the current system, every time you stream a song, it has the same value, though of course that’s only fractions of a cent. With the user-centric approach, the value of each stream would vary from listener to listener: a paid subscriber who streams a hundred songs per month would, in theory, give more to each artist than someone who listens to a thousand songs per month. Page, who has since left Spotify, argued in a recent interview that this would lead to royalty payouts that are “more volatile, and less predictable.”