[andy_wrote]

I like the idea of having a centralized exchange for buyers (readers) and sellers (writers). I would actually prefer it to be variable-fee rather than flat-fee, with buyers paying per article, and the exchange truly playing the role of an _exchange_, taking a commission per transaction.

There's still room for publishers, in the form of editing, curation, and financial support - say, funding a correspondent's trip to a war zone. I'd be fine with some of the price, ideally a transparent amount, going to publishers (or labels or guilds or whatever you want to call them).

The comparison with Spotify is interesting, because I would prefer Spotify to be this way too, and I say this as someone who uses Spotify very regularly. From my (admittedly non-firsthand) knowledge, Spotify has a kind of swap going on between listeners and artists/rights-holders where they take a fixed stream from listeners and pay variable streams to artists. (Although the variable leg is a percentage of the total fixed payments, so in aggregate Spotify pays a fixed leg and there's never a financial mismatch for them.)

At such small payment scales as "price of a song," I don't object to variation in payment being passed through to me. Spotify can take a cut for providing delivery and the app. If I feel like I'm spending too little or too much per month on music, I can scale my use, much like other expenditures in life. My inclination is to feel similarly about print media.