Technology

the music i get access to for the price i pay is worth far more than the money i don't get for the music i wrote.

Metallica, Dr Dre, et al were not wrong in suing Napster. We're seeing the fruits of the evolution of that format. I guess at least people aren't downloading "Get Back ft Stevie Wonder - Oasis.wma" anymore, and somebody is making money off of it. Just (mostly) not the artists that make the music.

Low cost, distributed digital distribution is absolutely a thing. Phones have enormous storage anymore, so much so most people could have their entire music collections available on their phones or tablets - not everyone - but most people.

A distributed streaming platform would really be the way to do this and make it cost effective for everybody. An app that could stream from a list of sources (remember playlists? M3U files that could play from multiple Internet locations - yeah, that already exists and has since before 2000) would enable people to stream the music they haven't found yet or are searching for.

Seems like an interesting open source software project, to be honest. Funkwhale is probably a good basis for extension, and could be run by the artists (or provided to then via a simple click to setup platform) for low overhead.

dibbidens

Alexa, play John Mellencamp - Ain't That America

Napster exists but people just ignore it

Although it's far from the best, Deezer has a much fairer royalties compensation method, which is more closely based on a per-user basis, rather than total amount of minutes listened (that Spotify currently employs).

This isn't super related to OPs post but I thought it might be worth mentioning aswell.

I've been using Deezer for a while now. Not only is the streaming quality (FLAC) much better but also the artist compensation much fairer. Plus, they at least act as if they actually cared for the customer...

The very great and very funny singer Neko Case made a playlist on Spotify and entitled it "PAY FOR IT YOU CHEAP PRICKS!!!!" I howled.