I think they should basically turn it into Twitch, where I can "sub" to an artist and maybe get their tracks earlier than others or some other additional content that costs artist $0 to produce for the most part (podcast, making of, e.g. a la Patreon). In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash. It's a shame that these hacks (streamers) become multimillionaires while real talents make pennies off actual art.
And/or something like Amazon Prime Video and how it aggregates its main subscription, ad-driven licensing, VOD and, that's what I'm getting at, hosted third party subscriptions into one UI.
I actually hate that in Prime, because discovery for shows and movies is never a positive experience but a setup chore separate from consumption, and advertising stuff that isn't already paid for always makes it worse. But for music I think it could actually be enjoyable, because you can consume and browse at the same time is actually a thing. Like diving into discogs.com while listening. I could easily see myself listening to some artist's main albums as part of some standard subscription (that pays as badly as spotify?) and then shell out a single digit payment on one hundred pay-per-listen tokens for obscure B-sides from the label that the artist is signed on, or something like that. Or reimplenent radio, by offering a licensing model where what would have been single releases in the olden days are part of the ad based subscription, but album content is only available through purchase or (various?) subscriptions.
Make it a marketplace of monetization models! Perhaps the right company to try this would be someone completely unexpected like cloudflare? Being a blank slate from both consumer and licensor perspective could almost be considered a prerequisite for a project like that...
> In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash.
There are donation buttons for some artist on Spotify. I guess the artist need to enable it? ("Signum Regis" is an artist that has a Donate button for example)
