Let's just get rid of the idea that we should pay to listen any song. I don't want to have my listening habits quantified or used as a proxy for how much any work of art is worth to me.
We can make this super simple: we can still keep the subscription model, we just need to change the revenue sharing system. Let's just charge a base monthly fee for the streaming service itself (say $1/month) and let's add a monthly "pay what you want" amount where 100% of the value goes specifically to the artists you choose.
So, let's say that I pledge to give $10/month, and I spread that around some 10-15 artists, This means that 90% of the money I am putting into the system is going to the artists. Someone wants to give $20/month, it would mean 95% of the money going to the "right" hands. We wouldn't have to argue about what the "right" hands are because that is defined directly by the people voting with their wallets.
Oh sure, I wasn't trying to propose that the coupling of usage to payment be mandatory. It's just that that's the setting I'd use because manually adjusting my payment settings sounds like work to me.
I'm just saying that paying the artist and handling the bits are totally separate things and if we want to challenge the existing model we should use something that decouples them in a way that demonstrates that the bad deal that artists are getting from Spotify is not the only option.
If you know the artists or anyone who would be interested to invest some time (and just a bit of money) to make this happen, let me know.
I have setup this system where people can set up how much they want to pay each artist per month (out of a fixed budget), and anyone that signs up to my service [0] gets an account on our Funkwhale server [1] where they can upload and promote their work. I take zero commission from these payouts, the only thing I need is to have content creators who prefer to pay a flat $29/year to have this instead of giving out 8%-12% of their earnings to Patreon.
We can make this super simple: we can still keep the subscription model, we just need to change the revenue sharing system. Let's just charge a base monthly fee for the streaming service itself (say $1/month) and let's add a monthly "pay what you want" amount where 100% of the value goes specifically to the artists you choose.
So, let's say that I pledge to give $10/month, and I spread that around some 10-15 artists, This means that 90% of the money I am putting into the system is going to the artists. Someone wants to give $20/month, it would mean 95% of the money going to the "right" hands. We wouldn't have to argue about what the "right" hands are because that is defined directly by the people voting with their wallets.