Just this weekend I wrote a "Ask HN" post about an alternative funding model for musicians. [0] The TL;DR: it would be a Patreon-style platform where people ca

Just this weekend I wrote a "Ask HN" post about an alternative funding model for musicians. [0] The TL;DR: it would be a Patreon-style platform where people can choose what artists they want to support directly, but instead of the artists defining "support tiers", it's the users who define a total fixed monthly contribution and how to split this among the many artists they want to support. The idea is that there are many people who would like to support many individual artists, but can not afford to give $5-$10 to each of them. With the contributions being fixed, the average contribution might be lower, but the total payout would increase. Another advantage of this model (compared to Spotify) is that it evens out the playing field a lot. The superstars already make most of their money from touring/merch/extra deals. The ones that are just starting and do not have the means (or the audience) to go on larger tours can rely instead of a more steady income from their (relatively) small fanbase. A quick look says that Spotify has > 600M users and ~1.5M artists. If this platform manages to get 400:1 ratio of users:artists, and each user donated $10/month, this means an average of $4000/artist/month. It wouldn't make everyone a millionaire, but it could certainly make for a lot more healthy industry than the status quo. [0] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39399121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39399121