We now have "Decentralised AI" working in the lab last month. So also the new music discovery, recommendation, fuzzy keyword search, spam filtering can be realised with full decentralisation (in principle). See live demo of our toy example [1]. Broad writeup [2]
[1] https://huggingface.co/spaces/tribler/de-dsi [2] https://torrentfreak.com/researchers-showcase-decentralized-...
A pre-release payment directly addresses the issue of piracy. Piracy just doesn't exist if the content isn't out there.
If we just accept the fact that piracy exists and that people are going to pirate and then ignore that aspect completely and carry on, I think you would be surprised how many people are willing to pay for things they want if the price is reasonable, regardless of whether they can get it for free via another method.