Well, considering that it is incredibly cheap to host and distribute digital media these days, individuals could still pay significantly more than the advertise

Well, considering that it is incredibly cheap to host and distribute digital media these days, individuals could still pay significantly more than the advertisers and it wouldn't cost them more than a few dollars a month. This co-op that your describing is basically the approach taken by certain songwriters and recording artists with Tidal, but again, we're talking about shares in the aggregator and purposefully deciding not to treat what is published as property in a marketplace. Songs played on terrestrial radio, for example, work very differently. You're right, if songwriters thought their content was valuable intellectual property, they wouldn't let a radio station play it for free, and they don't. Radio stations have to pay a percentage of their advertising profits as performance royalties to the songwriters. What's interesting is that Facebook seems to be headed towards a private version of this and is starting to share ad-revenue with content creators, mainly because when you don't do this, the content that people click on is so filled up with advertisements that it ruins the experience. Imagine Top 40 radio without performance royalties... the songs would probably be nothing but jingles as the songwriters would have to embed their profit making mechanisms directly in to the content itself!