Would You Pay Jay-Z & Kanye West For This?

As money from music sales have dried up faster than Lindsay Lohan's career over the past five years I've heard a lot of ideas about "alternative revenue streams" that artists are going to start using to rake in the bucks, and if there's one idea that's constantly referred to as the savoir, it's the subscription model.

In essence, the artist would set up a site and fans could subscribe to gain exclusives like behind-the-scenes videos, exclusive music, early alerts on tour dates, etc. It's an intriguing idea, but two things make me pessimistic.

First, you're now talking about essentially running an online business and media site, which most artists don't remotely have the expertise to do. (Trust me, this shit is a lot harder than it looks.)

Second, I'm just not convinced people care enough to pay. There may be a very small handful of artists with that type of pull - Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga - but how many rappers would you pay to see more or? If anything the problem these days is that there's too much material floating around.

In order to pull it off, at least in the early days, you'd have to be massively famous and have a huge budget and staff backing you up . Basically, you'd have to be Jay-Z and Kanye West. so it shouldn't come as a surprise that they're the first major urban act to give the idea a spin. For $4.99 a month subscribers will get behind-the-scenes looks at their Watch the Throne Tour, a documentary of Kanye, an animated series and a bunch more stuff. For example, there's currently a free clip of Ye recording his "Otis" verse on the homepage. Here, check it out;

Kanye West x Hova: Voyr.com

If this idea works it could help revolutionize the music industry, and if it doesn't, it will join the ranks of Friendster in the "Shit That Sounded Cool At First But Couldn't Last" Hall of Fame. Ultimately though it's not that complicated, RefinedHype Nation is exactly the demographic they're aiming for. Let's see what kind of future this thing has - and be honest: