Skander Esseghaier (U. de Chile)
Title: Music Streaming Payment Systems
Abstract: Digital music streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music adopted a Market-Centric Payment System (MCPS) to share streaming revenues across music rightsholders. This is in contrast to the User-Centric Payment System (UCPS) that has been recently adopted by multiple music streaming platforms such as Deezer and SoundCloud. Under UCPS, a track's Customer Share of Streams for a given customer determines the proportion of that customer's fee that is allocated to the track. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to investigate how each of these payment systems impacts competition between record label companies and the choice of musical repertoires they choose to promote.