Weird thought, but doesn't some of the stuff the blockchain people do potentially apply here? I'm not talking building a new coin or any of that crap. But rather more about just handling the transactions of plays and a distributed anonymized ledger. Artists can formulate a contract, users pay in and their pay gets distributed proportionally. I'm sure you could add zkps to help protect privacy. Could you get away with "proof of listen"? Could you stream via other users torrent style to move away from a central hub? Hosting and high upload speeds give you discounts. Maybe there's something in this (bad) idea?

I'm really just spitballing here. Seems really difficult to pull off, but what would such a system look like if we didn't design it for profit extraction and instead designed it to cut out all the middlemen? To really just make it as easy as possible for artists to connect to listeners. If we designed it without a desire to get rich

Yes so this is the future you're speaking of. A complete separation between client and server, and none of the current bs enshitified monopolies. Just need to wait a few years tm.