Resonate – A community-owned music network

$1 will let you try 500 songs. If in your musical explorations you listen to 200 songs once, 200 songs three times, and 100 songs many times (price capped at 9), then you would spend 200x0.002 + 200x0.014 + 100 = $103.2.

So the cost of exploring new tracks is almost zero, and for the ones you like you end up paying $1 to buy. To me that seems pretty cheap - you can add 10 new songs per month to your permanent collection for the same price as Spotify, with nearly unlimited trials of new songs.

To me this specific implementation seems to be not great (they talk about blockchain, no big artists on it yet, etc.), but the model seems very fair to me, and as a consumer I would prefer a model like this where the people I listen to actually get a nontrivial amount of money.

Do you actually listen to one unique album on repeat all day every day? You ever have a month where you listen to one record, or one record's worth of tracks every day? Now you pay $10... Or play it on random to have background noise and effectively pay nothing for a month. Or, more likely, play random to have music going all the time and pay effectively nothing, put tracks you like on a playlist, and then eventually buy all the songs on that playlist over time as you listen to that playlist. It will probably cost more, but not much more, and the distribution to the artists is more likely to be ethical.

This actually seems a lot more likely to be sustainable than the current model, which just grinds all but a few dozen artist's bones to dust until they quit music and get real jobs.

If this results in musicians being able to make a living, I love it. If not, at least it's trying. Pandora paying out $2700 for 40 million plays is bullshit. I don't mind paying for something that affects my life as positively as music does. I hope this works or leads to something that works.