I’d like to offer my own take on user-centric streaming that I’ll call the OC Streaming Model. The basic idea would be to introduce a streaming cap that would function similar to a marginal tax rate (if you’re wondering how the name was derived). Until a certain threshold, earnings from an individual song’s streams would be distributed to the songwriters and recording artists involved, while remaining earnings would be distributed to the artist’s respective label and/or publisher. (I’ll admit that I’m flexible when it comes to how the latter pool of revenue might be allocated, but I’ll stick with my initial suggestion going forward.) For example, if Post Malone received 592 million streams in a single month, a cap of 250 million streams would mean the money made from the remaining 342 million streams would be up for redistribution. The excess streaming revenue would then be distributed to other acts signed with the same label/publisher, with a majority going towards smaller acts and less going towards more successful ones. One concern discussed in the book Rockonomics was that music success is often only for the 0.1% of artists. User-centric streaming, as currently suggested, could make that worse, so this is an idea for how to truly help smaller artists.