You know if we could this open source self hosted stuff with a layer of Patreon on top people would pay something to all the people. If one could make it non-intrusive it could become a decent alternative to paying all these artists. I think Kanopy.com comes pretty close, its funded by tax payer dollars and is available via your local library.

Yes we absolutely could and should.

Sure, but they also got a cut from all of those dvds I bought before streaming services was a thing or the new dvds/blu-rays I am picking up now.

I mostly watch movies I have already seen before, but with the fragmentation and constant moving around that's happening with steaming services I would frequently end up using 3+ different ones every month. The constant cancel/renew cycle was a real hassle and very error prone, I would often forget one or two.

I only watch about 20 new movies a year, so even without hunting for bargains I will easily save a lot of money. But I will be looking for bargains, because why not.

I also now purchase blu-rays pretty often. I rip them, store them on my jellyfin sever, then put them in the neighborhood little free library box.

I also visit my local library almost every week. They have a surprisingly excellent movie and tv catalog!

I have now cancelled all my movie and music streaming services!

I suspect that buying an album through bandcamp results in the artist receiving way more money than what a subscription will ever pay them.

Absolutely, this was more of an appeal towards the "torrent crowd" that often doesn't even think about compensating the artists.

It is an incredibly, and almost criminally, small portion of the pie

Better than nothing...

At this point you might just order a tshirt from an indie band once a year to help out artists more than with a Spotify subscription.

Is it though? If it were nothing artists might be in a better negotiating position to demand something. But now instead of demanding payment, they are asking for a raise instead.

Weird thought, but doesn't some of the stuff the blockchain people do potentially apply here? I'm not talking building a new coin or any of that crap. But rather more about just handling the transactions of plays and a distributed anonymized ledger. Artists can formulate a contract, users pay in and their pay gets distributed proportionally. I'm sure you could add zkps to help protect privacy. Could you get away with "proof of listen"? Could you stream via other users torrent style to move away from a central hub? Hosting and high upload speeds give you discounts. Maybe there's something in this (bad) idea?

I'm really just spitballing here. Seems really difficult to pull off, but what would such a system look like if we didn't design it for profit extraction and instead designed it to cut out all the middlemen? To really just make it as easy as possible for artists to connect to listeners. If we designed it without a desire to get rich

Yes so this is the future you're speaking of. A complete separation between client and server, and none of the current bs enshitified monopolies. Just need to wait a few years tm.