Going against the grain is tiring, especially if you do it alone. The David vs. Goliath approach doesn’t work nearly as well as the Lilliputians vs. Gulliver approach. When services link up to create a cooperative network that’s more than the sum of its parts.
I talked about what would make alternative services more useful to me as a music listener in the discoverability topic.
TL;DR;
I know I’m always drawn back to the bigger search portals (BandCamp, YouTub) because I’m most likely to find something like what I’m looking for. Searching dozens of niche sites one by one, and finding mostly tumbleweeds, isn’t that much fun.
So let’s say there’s a federation of audio-hosting and social music services. Each with a search tool that can search across the whole network, including a complete index of all known released music. If I search for Rage Against the Machine, instead of getting nothing, I could at least get a copy of some publicly available information about them, with links to all the places I can hear it, and buy it.
Bringing this back to the topic of funding, decentralising the solution also decentralises that. Many different groups contribute their own components to overall ecosystem, and each can try funding methods that seem practical and legitimate to their values and goals.
To the degree that a unified search space would make it easier for listeners to find and pay the people making music they like, that also brings more funding into the overall space. Ideally independent musicians get more money coming in, and can use some of that to contribute to the groups developing the tools helping them do that. Win-win for everyone (except wealth extractors like VCs and oligopolists).