What do you mean by “Wavlake decides who gets splits”? When an artist uploads music to wavlake, they are deciding to give them a 10% split for a user interface (website maintenance and upgrades), supporting the mobile app, and hosting? The artist then determines the rest of the splits themselves. Artists can also host other releases themself or with other services (like thunder road media).
Discussion
There are many caveats to that statement:
1) The artist determines other splits *so long as those other splits are to another Wavlake account*
2) The number of splits is limited
3) 100% of funds flow to the Wavlake node *first* and then are divided up behind the scenes; the funds are fully custodied by Wavlake and you must ask permission to withdraw them.
4) Any of those policies can be changed at any moment in the future at their whim.
It is foolish for artists to give up all of their negotiating power in that manner. That structure does not solve any of the exploitation problems in the music industry, and it's not decentralized or independent.
Contrast that with a truly decentralized publishing method where you are the custodian of your own value and you can write in as many splits as you wish and you don't need to custody any of those splits; all parties can remain financially soverign.
I just sent this Boost to an episode of Phantom Power Artist Hour and all the splits are right there in the app.
These are also in the RSS feed if you want to get really nerdy and check the source of truth.
I also sent this Boost from my own node so I can take it a step further and check Helipad to make sure everything when where it was supposed to. 
Here’s all of these splits being paid from my node.
9 individual splits = 9 individual payments. 