[charliesome]

There's a few community radio stations in my home city. They play good music, support local musicians and local venues, and are largely funded by voluntary memberships. This membership gets you a bumper sticker and a good feeling.

Contrast this to the commercial radio stations which allocate a huge proportion of their airtime to annoying, dishonest, manipulative ads employing all sorts of shady tactics (like those discussed elsewhere in this comments thread) to try to part me with my money.

[_bxg1]

Sure, those sound great, but that's not a subscription, that's a donation. And sustaining something via donations requires a huge confluence of people caring about something all at the same time with single-minded intentionality. It's fantastic when it works out, but it's far from being something you can just prescribe as a solution. People are finnicky, and without a unifying ethos this model simply isn't realistic in the general case.

This is the biggest strength of government-organized public spending, by the way. Some people say private organizations - when you include nonprofits - can accomplish anything a government can. And that's true in theory, but in practice certain things don't work at all unless everyone's on the exact same page. And turns out it's really hard getting everyone on the exact same page. So democracy says "we're going to vote on what that exact same page is, but then we're all going to act as a single unit no matter how we individually feel about the decision". Some things can only work that way.