Could the streaming music royalty model improve? Absolutely!
The current model works like this: There is a pool of royalty money (70% of Spotify subscription). It gets apportioned to each artist by the number of streams the artist had divided by the total number of streams all artists had.
The user-centric payment model would have a royalty pool for each streaming service subscriber apportioned by what they alone listened to. This would benefit more niche artists.