In its heyday, MP3.com was the internet home to many independent musicians, each of whom had an individual web presence at the memorable URL www.mp3.com/name-of-act. At the end of 1999, MP3.com launched a promotion that allowed these artists to monetize their content on the site. Called "Pay for Play," or P4P, it used an algorithm to pay each MP3.com artist on the basis of the number of streams and downloads of their songs... Artists provided 4 days (96 hours) of audio content per day from Summer 1999 to Summer of 2003. This equates to about 1 song per minute or 16 listening years of audio content over a 4-year period. A staff of trained music experts reviewed all content prior to publication to prevent uploads of pirated materials... Alanis Morissette was an early investor in the site after it sponsored one of her tours. She owned nearly 400,000 shares in the company which she sold off through a series of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings in late 1999 and early 2000. Her holdings and profit from the venture topped $3.4 million at her exit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com#Original_version

Buddy of mine made over six grand through MP3.com. They had a decent structure, and they paid their artists because people bought music. Despite being a publicly-traded company that formed the heart of Roxio, which monetized music more effectively than (and fifteen years before) BandCamp, everyone wants to focus on Napster.

Probably because anybody paying any attention can point out that all the Majors needed to do was invest in MP3.com and they would have been fine.

This article was written the day after Oink died (fun fact: the iPod debuted and Oink died on October 23, four years apart). It was a truly spectacular site. At the time, Sony and Vivendi Universal had both admitted to seeding titles on Oink to get their music into the hands of tastemakers. However, it was a site with zero monetization and ultimate quality control, a natural response to mp3.com (excellent quality control, poor selection, monetization) and napster (piss-poor quality control, large selection, zero monetization). Since then, what.cd has become orders of magnitude greater than oink ever was and spotify and their ilk have become the pennies-on-the-dollar model that everybody knew the majors would eventually end up at.

Through the long lens of history, though, I've realized a few things. At the time, everyone knew the labels were doomed, particularly the labels. And at the time, everyone at the labels knew they needed to make their money while they could and keep the gravy train running as long as possible. At the time, everyone knew that eventually music would be free and that an entire industry would go the way of the ice cutters. And at the time, everyone was covering their own asses and damn the rest of the fleet. It was a classic tragedy of the commons problem.

Movies are the same way.

It's funny; I hit the music industry about a year before MP3. I hit the television and motion picture industry about a year before Netflix started streaming. I'm walking into the fiction industry right about the time Amazon decides to destroy publishing. Sometimes I feel a little bit like a monk, eking out my existence as a transcriber and illuminator of pages for as long as I can, fully knowing the Gutenberg press is coming for my livelihood.

But sometimes I am Death, destroyer of worlds.

The author has that self-righteous "anything the RIAA or DMCA is opposed to must be just" mentality that happens easily when the moral and ethical high ground is held by belligerent assholes. A lot of it persists in the torrenting community. The problem remains, though - why is torrenting unethical but streaming ethical? Because the ethical streamer sits still and lets advertisements wash over him. And really, that's media monetization in a nutshell: "sit in one place while we bombard you with advertisements and we will entertain you for free." Except even Apple is helping you run adblock in Safari now. Is it any wonder that Google spun off Google?

Here's the real question: what does entertainment look like when your choices are "paid" or "free" with no middle ground? 'cuz that's where we're going. My money is on Netflix... and whatever version of mp3.com/spotify/iTunes Radio/Whatever that monetizes artists enough for them to want to participate.