There are two, hot tools used by capitalism right now: exclusivity and subscription.
Exclusivity works for a while, until it doesn’t. If you’re successful or wildly successful with exclusive content, people will either copy, steal or offer more for said exclusivity. It doesn’t scale at all. We see this a lot in video games these days; games are far too expensive to make to be exclusive to one platform. It goes back to simple economics: it is good to sell something to a lot of people, rather than less.
Subscription sounds like the ultimate capitalist tool: you will pay for the rest of your life with contract renewals (adding more and more bullet points, mmhmm). But subscription hits two very hard obstacles. First, on the consumer side: we can’t subscribe to everything, that’s unsustainable as hell! I saw the other day Mercedes talking about $1200 annual subscription to get software improvements on electric vehicles, what kind of landlord BS is that? Unsustainable.
But the part that most people forget about subscription that really sucks, is on the producer side: you need to produce quality, constantly. You can’t never rest. You have to get that content out there (otherwise you lose income instantly), and that’s massive anxiety. The relationship between producer and customer becomes quite abusive. I know Patreon creators feel me on that one. It doesn’t work well with intellectual and creative work, which is often born from accidents and progress through iteration. So you start adding water to your lemonade and now people are resentful and either give you nasty feedback, leave, or both.
Conclusion: UBI, baby! Because nothing else works.