What about an aggregation company to whom artists can give a global, non-exclusive, irrevocable license that only gets licenses to songs and albums if and when the artists want?
This company would not be owned by the artists but rather by a benevolent third party that promises to do no evil (no sarcasm intended).
I am still not sure how the revenue will flow back to the artists as they do not own this new totally legitimate facilitating entity though. Ideally, we'd want to retain as little money as possible and send as much as possible back to the artists. My motivation is to let artists be in the driving seat as much as possible which means they reap as much of the profit as possible and also bear as much of the risk of their investment as well.
I have no expertise to comment on the contractual merits of this general approach.
On the specific issue of payments: if there was a way to perform real-time "splitting" of bulk payments from distributors to the "broker", they could subtract their small fee and pay the artists at the same time.
Somewhat like PayPal Adaptive Payments, but with a potentially very large number of recipients per transaction. This way, none of the artists' funds are ever held by the broker, even for a short time.
There are lot of details here around varying fee percentages for different services, and ensuring that information does not leak between distributor, broker and payment gateway.
This company would not be owned by the artists but rather by a benevolent third party that promises to do no evil (no sarcasm intended).
I am still not sure how the revenue will flow back to the artists as they do not own this new totally legitimate facilitating entity though. Ideally, we'd want to retain as little money as possible and send as much as possible back to the artists. My motivation is to let artists be in the driving seat as much as possible which means they reap as much of the profit as possible and also bear as much of the risk of their investment as well.
Ideas?