This is what should have happened years ago. I hope they aren't too late.
>Commercial distribution of music to end users in FLAC is a perfect solution as far as I'm concerned.
Do iphones support FLAC now? If not, well... it was a nice idea. You've also got the problem that Apple might decide it wants to do streaming and removes your app from its store.
Lastly, but not leastly... how much per month? I'm all for not under-funding things, but are there still people who spend that much on music every month who don't want to buy the CD? Is the service that different from, say, Swift's Vevo postings with the video discarded? Hello JDownloader2, my caching friend!
Perhaps there is a market out there which can be tapped, but streaming has always seemed to me to be a solution looking for a problem and not finding a problem large enough to allow funding. Oh it solves artists' problems, but it doesn't solve customers' problems.
Its a bit like catch-up tv streaming. Quite frankly, its worse than piracy. I don't mean, "I don't want to watch commercials" I mean, the compression is so high and the streaming so flaky that it hurts my eyes and irritates me when it crashes and I have to try to scroll through and find my place again, but also watch all the adverts all over again. Torrents give better quality. Why not just put in short adverts of uneven length so it isn't worth skipping and push the video out on a tracker?