> A better version of your question is – why do newspapers charge for a monthly subscription instead of a per-article fee? The simple reason is that the numbers just don't work out. They'd have to charge a lot per article and have people pay for a lot of them to break even with the current subscription or ad-supported model, and that's not going to happen. And even if they do, there would just be too much day-to-day variance in sales. The reason subscriptions are popular is that businesses like a steady, predictable stream of revenue.

What the newspapers need is something like ASCAP that can act as a single revenue management entity for microtransactions. What no one wants is to have 30 news subscriptions, and so what actually happens is everyone has ~zero news subscriptions. It's happening with video now too as Disney+, HBO, Prime, Netflix, etc. are each fighting over limited monthly subscriptions to segmented markets as opposed to Spotify, Pandora, etc. being gateways to one large market.

I don't know the details of how or why ASCAP has managed to do for the music industry what pretty much no other industry has been able to achieve. ASCAP isn't even exclusively licensed.