It's perfectly reasonable to pay a little bit to support the app you're using. It beats having a free app that sells your data to make ends meet.
this territory is moderated
Depends what you are paying for. With Fountain you are paying to install yet another (wannabe) middle man and a new centralised platform. Once they reach a certain amount of market share (or, as I guess they are dreaming of, dominant market share) there will be nothing to stop them from jacking up their fees and decreasing the payout percentage to artists. Right now they're doing the usual VC play of making it attractive to new users with lowish fees to get growth and spruiking false 'community' talk and hyping buzzwords (bitcoin, lightning, etc). Just because you use cool technologies (and obviously we all agree here that bitcoin & lighting are cool) doesn't make your centralised platform cool.
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How is it a centralized platform? They're pulling in music from wavlake/RSS and taking a small cut for using the app, just like they do with podcasts. If you want direct access, there will surely be a FOSS listener that doesn't take any cut (and will suck because there's no funding)
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