I get it. You feel like maybe we're hitting some fundamental limitation of capitalism, whereby deserving artists aren't properly supported by the economic ecosystem around them. You're right in the media ecosystem is weird here. Music is relatively unique in that it is something that's easy to consume more or less piecemeal. Nobody reads only 1/12th of a book or watches 3/10ths of a movie, but these are common in how people relate to music.

But what if there's another possibility?

I think we're expecting the future and present of music to not look like the past of music. Music, like pretty much all forms of art, has a small number of professionals and a large number of very talented non-professionals.

What's changed is how professionals attain that status. Once upon a time it was impress something really rich enough to be hired on permanently. Then this complex system involving record labels came into being. Now we have a couple of different viable models at hand, and we have yet to settle on one as the dominant new model.

Couple this with a lowered barrier to entry and generally increased competition for entertainment dollars (which compete with mobile games, ebooks, etc.), and users have good reason to favor subscription models. Artists have yet to puzzle out how best to interact with this, but I have faith people will get there.

I wouldn't call it a limit of capitalism. I would call it a limit of the old music business model.

Take this with a grain of salt as economics is not my field but...

>You feel like maybe we're hitting some fundamental limitation of capitalism, whereby deserving artists aren't properly supported by the economic ecosystem around them.

It's actually the opposite. I would like the artists to get paid, but it's more that the payment barrier seems like a waste of time and energy.

> Couple this with a lowered barrier to entry and generally increased competition for entertainment dollars (which compete with mobile games, ebooks, etc.), and users have good reason to favor subscription models. Artists have yet to puzzle out how best to interact with this, but I have faith people will get there.

This is what I mean by seeing the limits. The subscription model makes no sense to me. It's inefficient at best, and it's clearly not working out.

It's not that I mind paying, it's that I don't want the work-flow for accessing new content to be limited by a payment barrier. But capitalism encourages the growth of artificial barriers for payment. It's just easier and a better use of time to bypass the payment method, even a subscription based one. It's more efficient for everyone if we could figure out a payment method and avoid that artificial barrier.

So far, a subscription model is as close as we've come. It allows users to deal with a minimum of payment friction a minimal number of times while still paying.

Any time your business is exchanging information for money - music, video games, movies, etc - there's always an incentive to circumvent it. The approach thus far has been to make it convenient, easy, and cheap enough that users are willing to pay in some fashion.

I am deeply curious what you imagine this artificial-barrier-free experience that still coerces payments to be like, however.

A subscription model is the best that I've see so far, but it's still a shitty system, and it seems fundamentally so, IMO.

> Any time your business is exchanging information for money - music, video games, movies, etc - there's always an incentive to circumvent it.

Sure, but the new incentive is that it is currently a better product/service in almost every aspect. It used to be that circumvention was to save money, but that's not why a large number of people do it now. The service is better, the quality is better, the selection is better, etc. Maybe I'm missing something, but other than "the artist gets paid" I can't think of a single thing that going through an official route makes better.

> I am deeply curious what you imagine this artificial-barrier-free experience that still coerces payments to be like, however.

I have no idea, that's why I'm wondering if we've hit a limit to our current system. And it's not just music, basically anything that's digitally distributed is running into the same limit.

I believe you may be underplaying the role time plays in these matters.

Curation, collection, access, and reliability are all value-adds. In my student days as a profligate music pirate, I had to put a non-zero amount of time into making sure the stuff I'd torrented was of a reasonable quality, tagged in compliance with my schema, and accessible where I wanted it to be. I was willing to do that because $10/mo was a lot of money to me at the time and I had time to spare.

Today, a new album from a band I like is one click and two seconds away from being actively in my eardrums. $10/mo is no longer a lot of money to me, and worth paying to avoid an hour of work a month.

> Curation, collection, access, and reliability are all value-adds.

That's even more of an argument that our current system isn't working. You might want to look into the current non-official music scene. Non-official sources of music come way better organized and faster than the legit sources that I've bought from. Tags are done correctly, quality is much better, and it's online before a lot of sites put it up. I've also had music that I paid for disappear because the company I "bought" it from went away.

Having a middle-man for this transaction has mostly been a waste of time for me.