---
title: Pro-rata vs user-centric: why there is no per-stream rate
publisher: RapCanon
canonical: https://rapcanon.com/glossary/pro-rata-vs-user-centric/
license: CC-BY-4.0
retrieved: 2026-08-12
---

> Pro-rata and user-centric are two ways of dividing a streaming service's subscription revenue among rights holders.

Glossary · Economics

 
# Pro-rata versus user-centric

 
also filed under: royalty pool model, market-centric, user-centric licensing

 
 

 
 Pro-rata and user-centric are two ways of dividing a streaming service's subscription revenue among rights holders. 

 
## The mechanism

 
Under pro-rata, all subscription money for a period goes into one pool and is divided by each rights holder's share of TOTAL streams on the service. Under user-centric, each individual subscriber's fee is divided among only the artists that subscriber actually played. The same listening produces different payouts under the two models, because pro-rata rewards share of total volume while user-centric rewards share of a listener's attention.

 
## A worked example

 A subscriber plays one niche artist exclusively for a month. Under user-centric, that artist receives a share of that person's subscription. Under pro-rata, the artist receives a share proportional to their fraction of every stream on the platform, which for a niche act is far smaller. 

 There is no per-stream rate. There is a pool and a formula. 

 
## What it is confused with

 - Per-stream rate The per-stream rate is an OUTPUT of whichever model is in use, not an input. This is why no fixed per-stream rate exists and why every published figure differs.
- Payout threshold Thresholds decide whether a track is eligible to be paid at all. The pool model decides how the money is divided among eligible tracks.
 

 
## Why it matters

 
Most published per-stream figures are quoted with no mention of the pool model that produced them, which makes them incomparable across services and across time.

 
Sources: US Copyright Office
 This entry is part of an open dataset published under CC-BY 4.0. Reuse it, including commercially, with attribution.
 Related: Recoupment · Black box royalties · 360 deal

---

## How to cite this page

**APA**
RapCanon. (2026). Pro-rata vs user-centric: why there is no per-stream rate. Retrieved from https://rapcanon.com/glossary/pro-rata-vs-user-centric/

**BibTeX**
```bibtex
@misc{rapcanon-glossary-pro-rata-vs-user-centric,
  title  = {Pro-rata vs user-centric: why there is no per-stream rate},
  author = {{RapCanon}},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://rapcanon.com/glossary/pro-rata-vs-user-centric/},
  note   = {Accessed: 2026-08-12}
}
```

**Wikipedia**
```
{{cite web |title=Pro-rata vs user-centric: why there is no per-stream rate |url=https://rapcanon.com/glossary/pro-rata-vs-user-centric/ |publisher=RapCanon |access-date=2026-08-12}}
```

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Canonical HTML: https://rapcanon.com/glossary/pro-rata-vs-user-centric/