I think it mostly comes down to having way too much cognitive overhead. All the options I've seen presented just require far too many value decisions too frequently. Once nice bundle I can be quite sure of is just requires so much less thinking. It's even better because I can frame it in my head as exchanging money for a physical thing, and then I can do whatever I want with that physical thing - including ignore it.

Micropayments really suffer from this constantly. So much so that I think the value of the content goes negative once you factor in the costs to decide if you want to pay for it and then the costs of paying for it (mostly not monetary costs). Individual subscriptions (aka Patreon) bulk them all together at once and will just keep happening so you better keep on top of them.

The main alternative that doesn't quite suffer from this is the model of a single payment that gets smeared automatically across everything. I chuck in $X/month and it gets automatically distributed to all the sites I've visted somehow. I think this suffers from different problems. Namely that I probably don't want to pay in proportion to time spent or pages viewed but value. My money would probably end up largely going to the big companies and not so much to the little guys, while I'd probably personally choose the opposite proportions. And other times there are websites you've visited that you definitely don't want to give money to, because they managed to SEO their utterly useless page into your search results, or whatever. So now you have to go deal with that, or else pay them for troubling you.

And then before long you've gotten so deep into engineering how this payment gets distributed that you're practically at the level of micropayments anyway.

And then you start considering things like privacy, or issues with payment processors caring about content and... it all just gets far too messy.

You probably would need to get to some sort of aggregator with either a fixed or max monthly fee. The problem at that point is that no one who can attract a significant number of subscribers on their own will participate. Imagine a newspaper/magazine subscription that the NYT, WSJ, Post, New Yorker, Bloomberg, Atlantic, etc. don't participate in.

And then you have the streaming video issue. Aggregator A has this writer but not that writer, etc.

The writer could just say that in addition to this article being published in NYT, I will retain the right to publish it on aggregator A and B. I don't expect the newspapers to participate.

What's different about news and music is that there's not so much interest in the back catalog in news. So publishers could have less power than record companies.

Regarding streaming, again, that's only a problem if there is exclusivity.

>The writer could just say that in addition to this article being published in NYT, I will retain the right to publish it on aggregator A and B. I don't expect the newspapers to participate.

You do have that with syndicated columns, cartoons, wire service copy, etc. Although the NYT uses less of that sort of content than many papers do.

Yes, but not from a consumer point of view. If I want to read those AFP and Reuters stories, I still have to go to a select small paywalled garden, ie I can't get all of them with one monthly payment.

It's a different topology from Spotify and Apple Music.

At least you could have reputable aggregators or "raters" for these kind of articles.

Absolutely! You could have a single aggregator which selects different articles and publishes them. It would stake its reputation on the quality of its journalism. Writers would compete to get into the best aggregator. This is a great idea. Needs a name. How about "newspaper"?

Pandora.com, which launched in 2000, predating Spotify by 6 years, did a really good with discoverability. That was actually their primary feature - customizable radio stations, that you'd seed with a specific suggestion, and then further curate with a thumbs up/thumbs down. If you put in some time and effort, the stations would get really good at knowing what you liked, and would introduce new music. Spotify's radio feature is a poor shadow of this feature. (Soundcloud's is even worse.)

Because it's music, and not written text, and thus on in the background, having an 80/20 (or whatever) split for old/new music was really great for discovering new music that's similar.

TikTok solved discoverability for brief video clips, but they demand full attention. Basically the opposite of music.

Discoverability for the written word is a bit more complex, especially for long form articles.

(Pandora's backend implementation irrelevant here. Pandora predates the popularity of ML, so I presume there was a lot of human effort going on behind the scenes to make it work so well.)

pandora used the music genome project to get so good:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project

I'm sure a columnist would find a way to make this work, but the typical journalist adapting a report from AP or Reuters won't.

No, that's the problem.

If I want to listen to Lady Gaga, I can do that from any of the music services. The artist gets a cut from my monthly payment to whichever service I use.

If I want to read an article about traveling to Iceland during Covid times and it's in Washington Post while I subscribe to the New York Times, I can't, unless I subscribe to the Washington Post.

Maybe a writer writing to NYT does get money according to the amount of clicks to their article. Some articles can even be free and the money comes from ad revenue. But it's still a small walled garden. People just don't get to see many well written articles because they are locked behind this small garden paywall and most people don't want to pay the entrance fee.

How about a "Writer Money Distribution service". People could subscribe to it. You could build a curated edited newspaper out of such articles, if you wanted. But a user could also read any article, and they would know that their monthly money would be distributed to the writers according to the what they did read. There could be even multiple services and the same writer could publish to multiple with no exclusivity clause.

Edit: Hell, Hacker News is one excellent article curation service that has supplanted the place of a newspaper. But there's no revenue feedback mechanism. What does the writer benefit from being linked to from HN? Many people use some go-around-the-paywall service since they don't want to subscribe, which indeed would be irrational for only a few articles every now and then.

The problem in your analogy is you don’t think Lady Gaga is worth paying close attention to. Substack’s proposition is that an individual writer has an audience willing to pay to read much or all of what the writer publishes. It’s not a business model seeking dabblers on either side of the transaction.

Good way of putting it. Substack, as currently positioned, is for people who are sufficiently motivated to pay the equivalent of a traditional magazine subscription for maybe a few writers who produce engaging content, presumably on a frequent basis, that they find worth paying for relative to free alternatives.

I assume Substack payouts are very power law.