We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB). It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.
I dont think its a huge leap to think artists would rather you be able to buy their music once and make a $ instead of stream it from a sevice that pays them next to nothing.
What is stopping them? But it seems that general consensus here is that artists would like you to listen for free and here and there buy something from them.