Music streaming services shift focus to artist pay amid transparency and AI concerns

A growing number of music platforms are prioritising artist compensation and transparency, withinnovative models and AI content management reshaping the streaming landscape.

A growing group of music services is trying to sell itself not on size but on how it handles artist pay. Engadget says the field includes Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, Qobuz and Coda, each offering a slightly different answer to the same problem: how to make streaming less opaque for listeners and less punishing for musicians. Tidal, once promoted as an artist-friendly alternative, now sits inside Block, the payments and financial technology group formerly known as Square, after Block took a majority stake in 2021.

That ownership change matters because it blunts Tidal’s old image as an independent, musician-first platform. Engadget notes that Tidal’s direct artist payouts programme was ended in 2023, and the company did not respond to questions about its current payment system. The result is a service that still competes on sound quality and curation, but no longer offers the same simple pitch about routing part of a subscriber’s fee straight to favoured artists.

Deezer is taking a more explicit swing at the economics of streaming. According to Deezer’s own description of its artist-centric model, the platform starts with the usual revenue split after taking its share, but then adds engagement-based multipliers. Streams that come from a manual search can be paid at twice the standard rate, while artists with more than 500 unique monthly listeners and at least 1,000 monthly plays can also qualify for double rates. Deezer says those rules can stack, creating a four-times effect in some cases. It has also removed background audio from monetisation and set a 1,000-stream-per-user cap aimed at curbing fraud.

The French streamer has also positioned itself as more aggressive than many rivals in dealing with artificial intelligence content. Deezer said in April that it can identify and remove AI-generated tracks from recommendation playlists, that it treats 85% of AI-generated music as fraudulent and that it de-monetises those streams. The company says AI-generated material makes up between 1% and 3% of total streams, suggesting the issue is still limited in financial terms, but one it is watching closely.

Qobuz is targeting a different audience altogether: listeners who care about high-resolution audio and are willing to pay for it. Its basic plan sits near the top of the market, but includes FLAC 24-bit playback up to 192kHz, which will matter most to users with capable equipment and a decent home or desktop set-up. Qobuz also offers a higher-priced annual tier with purchase discounts for people who want to buy downloads rather than rely only on access.

On payouts, Qobuz is one of the few services that has published a concrete figure. In a March 2025 statement, the company said it distributed an average of $0.01873 per stream in 2024, translating to $18.73 for 1,000 plays before labels, publishers and contracts take their own shares. It also said its average revenue per user was $121.13, well above a market average it cited of $22.38. That does not by itself prove the service is better for every artist, but it does give listeners a clearer picture than the industry usually provides.

Coda is newer and less established, but it is trying to differentiate itself through social discovery rather than algorithmic recommendation. The app gives users a profile page that resembles a social network, with recent plays, playlists, favourite artists and posts. It then uses a following feed to surface recommendations from people and artists rather than relying only on machine-generated suggestions.

Coda is also unusually direct about money. CEO Randy Fusee told Engadget that the service paid an average of $0.014 per stream in April 2026, slightly below Qobuz’s disclosed 2024 figure. The company also allows subscribers to direct $1 of their monthly fee to a chosen artist, although many artists appear not to have opted in yet. That makes the idea promising but still limited in practice.

Vocana goes even further by making independence part of its core design. Neil Sheehan, the company’s president, told Engadget that the catalogue is entirely independent and that a subscriber’s fee is allocated only to artists they actually listen to. The service is in beta and free to try, with a planned monthly price of $9 once it fully launches. It is not a direct substitute for Spotify’s mass-market catalogue, but it does point to a more tightly targeted model of music funding.