If I had the time to dedicate I would start with the idea that creative works are non-random pieces of unique valuable information. Then I would delve heavily into information theory, byzantine agreement, crypto currencies, and similar areas and see what I could come up with.
So you make your product, upload it to the Popcoin swarm, the more people who download it as a percentage of the total traffic in that class (1080p hd movies competing with other 1080p hd movies for example, rather than books. If this turns out to be infeasible some other metric for how popular a given piece of entertainment is), the more the address registered for the bitstream receives from the block reward.
Popcoins trade on an exchange for real cryptocurrencies and thus have a market value, artists that make and register content get paid. The more popular and prevalent the distribution mechanism, the more the participants get, so there's incentive to make it viral.
All I was saying is that creating an app that explicitly works to make piracy as easy as possible and to throw as much pirated content as possible at the user is kind of a dick move. It's doubly a dick move if they end up profiting from it. When money gets involved in piracy I think any grey area that might be there goes away. Now it really is stealing, plain and simple. It's worse than any sketchy lawyered-up studio exec.
How exactly does it stink? Apple provides a service and a platform for selling music, and they take a cut so they can continue to provide said service, which obviously isn't free to run.
And if you're unhappy with the size of the cut they're taking, it's not like you don't have options - Bandcamp (my favorite digital music store simply because they have no region locking bullshit and default lossless with a whole bunch of other format options for one price, the same which unfortunately can't be said of most legal digital outlets) only takes a 10% cut, and if you want, you could always sell directly on your website with the likes of Stripe and such (but even then you're going to be paying some fees). Of course, the last one requires the most work on the artist's part, but that's how it goes - you either pay someone else to do it for you (the cuts on iTunes, Bandcamp, etc) or you do it yourself.
Let's say we roll the clock back to before DRM was enshrined in what used to be general purpose computing hardware. Let's say we had the option to refuse it. Would you rather have DRM and movies on your now not-quite-personally controlled computer, or would you rather have one less threat vector for pervasive surveillance?
That's the choice. You can hand over control of part of your computer to some very sketchy people and have movies, or you can make the relatively small number of artists who make a living off recorded performances find a different way to monetize.