I thought your original (but redacted) post outlining some of your monetization plans were brilliant.
That being said, I think one bitshares 2.0-esque referral type system that may work somewhat would be charging for a "Premium" account which allows the user to submit playlists and/or entire custom channels (let them be their own DJ with access to the peertracks catalogue).
Allow the user to make $$$ (or at least -$$$ off their monthly "Premium") based off how many people and how popular their playlists are.
Just to add some additional support to my earlier suggestion:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/09/apple-music-interview-jimmy-iovine-eddy-cue
http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2015/07/06/humans-not-algorithms-apple-music-revolution-and-growing-influence-curator
http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/07/05/human-curation-is-back/
Apple is going big on human curation for good reason. I think it would benefit Peertracks to make it a highlighted feature with the possibility to earn income from it.
This can not only allow for competition to create better playlists and channels, but could also be a way to bring about new era of popular DJ's or even new talk radio type personalities like Howard Stern.
So you are suggesting public playlist creation would be a paid feature.
They would be ranked how exactly? upvotes?
And how are the playlist creators compensated exactly? The upvotes being payments?
If so, why would a user upvote/pay to have a playlist rise in the ranking? What does that person get out of it (unless he's an artist featured on that playlist of course)?
Not a paid feature - Rather a built-in, standard feature quite similar to the function of Google Music, where a search brings up not only tracks, albums and artists - but also playlists that might include or be related to the search.
I would suspect that the most accurate and useful way to rank individual playlists would be how often they are chosen by listeners/users of Peertracks and whether they like/save/share the playlist as well as how often they go back to listen to it.
I imagine that it would be best for Peertracks to incorporate and handle payments from their end - using a small fraction of the funds that will currently be used to pay the artists/labels, etc.
I would suspect this feature should sell itself to artists/labels, etc. as one of the primary goals is getting users to listen and use Peertracks as their source of music/entertainment.
The way other systems currently use playlist curators is pretty much equal to unpaid marketers.
Payments to playlist curators may get tricky due to regulation/tax/whateverelse overhead - I suspect the CNX guys may know this area much better than I.
If Peertracks is successful, popular playlist curators would be able to compensate themselves by investing in smaller, lesser-known artists before finding their way to their well-shared and populated playlists.
I'm sure the most successful ones will have to navigate a new era of payola, as I suspect that with the Peertracks system - any abuse will find them losing subscribers quickly.
At the very least, I would imagine you can give them credit toward, or completely cover premium accounts for useful curators - maybe tokens akin to Brownie.PTS as well?
Additionally, I see every one of these features ALSO working well carried into an author/ebooks platform.
I try to view everything on this blockchain through both filters lately and they seem to match perfectly as far as I can see.
Maybe more importantly, I believe that independent authors, may offer a very important adoption advantage simply due to the fact that they write - and write well - often news, blogs and opinion articles besides just books.
What a terrific and effective way to propagate the formula ;-)