It's important that they pay the royalty to themselves because the royalty is a fraction of your subscription fee divided by the number of royalties paid. Paying one to themselves dilutes the others.
It's amazing how many people commenting on streaming royalties don't understand this fact, claiming for instance that s music treaming service X plays more per stream.
It may well do, but if so, that's because they have more passive subscribers, or more generally that their users listen to less music. Possibly because their recommendation services are worse (most were much worse than Spotify's last time I checked), or possibly just because they have less users streaming all day in their hair salon etc.
(This payment scheme also why Jay Z's Tidal, when it inflated the listens of Beyonce's "Lemonade" and Kanye's "Life of Pablo", stole from every other artist on that platform. I'm still amazed they got away with that, but I guess Norwegian courts weren't prepared for the "shit-flinging monkey" legal strategy.)
It's amazing how many people commenting on streaming royalties don't understand this fact, claiming for instance that s music treaming service X plays more per stream.
It may well do, but if so, that's because they have more passive subscribers, or more generally that their users listen to less music. Possibly because their recommendation services are worse (most were much worse than Spotify's last time I checked), or possibly just because they have less users streaming all day in their hair salon etc.
(This payment scheme also why Jay Z's Tidal, when it inflated the listens of Beyonce's "Lemonade" and Kanye's "Life of Pablo", stole from every other artist on that platform. I'm still amazed they got away with that, but I guess Norwegian courts weren't prepared for the "shit-flinging monkey" legal strategy.)