It technically happened of course in the form of various companies trying to build systems that do this (using e.g. crypto currencies) and put themselves in the middle to try to "own" and control the lucrative revenue streams. But that's the reason it never happens because as soon as you do that, you end up with a fragmented mess of different companies all failing to get a critical mass of actual micropayments happening. So, the money exchanged adds up to not much at all. Most artists keep on dealing with agents and big media corporations. And most consumers keep on handing over chunks of their income to those same corporations.
I've not actually bought a newspaper or a magazine in over ten years and very little in the ten before that. I regularly did this in the nineties though. There no longer is a need. I can read a lot online for free. And I do. But I do feel sort of bad for the hard working journalists producing all the content I read every day not really getting anything from me.
Authors struggle not in finding their audience but in monetizing it. Ads are not the way. I'd love to have a sane way to reward them without having to micromanage the expense. If somebody builds a way for me to fairly distribute 20$/month among the authors of all the content I enjoy every month, I'd be happy to. That doesn't exist. That's money I've not been spending for decades. I spent that on Spotify and Netflix though.
IMHO such a system should exist. Douglas Adams predicted it because it so obviously needs to exist. Instead we've got this endless amount of greed and stupidity preventing people from making a living from creating content because middle men peddling shitty ads for shitty products need to be payed off. The content creation is the bit I want to pay for. Everything else is redundant or can be payed for by authors as needed once they have revenue (e.g. editing is a useful service).
Maybe I read a few hundred articles per month. Lets call it 200 (nice round number). That's ten cents per article. Now imagine that a journalist produces something that is read by 1 million people and that 1 percent of those actually pay that 10 cent. That's a thousand dollar. It's not a lot. But if they write maybe a few articles per month, that's a nice income. And those articles stay online for a long time. It would actually stimulate the creation of content that has a long shelf life. Passive income basically. Exactly what I want as a reader: quality content.