The Hows, Whats, and Gwuhs? of music distribution in the future

I was thinking about what kind of model for music sales that we'll see in the future. I don't think any of the existing models are really all that viable - the notion of the physical record seems like a dead one, and the extreme DRM controls that the big companies are trying to stick to down services (I won't go out of my way to deride Apple in this post for a change, although I easily could on this front) make itunes and whatnot to be a non-starter for a large number of people. But are there any visible and viable alternatives?

I don't know if this idea has been floated before (I'm sure someone has posited it at some point), but I haven't heard anyone mention it. Isn't a somewhat likely means of resolving this issue that someday we'll move to a model where every RIAA song is available for streaming automatically, but you simply pay a small fee (like a cent) every time you listen to any song? Obviously we're not at the point technologically where you can stream high quality songs to any computer, mp3 player, car stereo, etc like that...but that's definitely coming in the near future.

Take the average song one downloads from a music service that charges $1 per song - how likely are you to listen to that song one hundred times? Even if it was a song you really liked, you probably were only going to listen, say, 30 times in the next year - that'd just be 30 cents! I think both sides would win, because people would feel free to listen to anything out there, browse around more musically, and end up getting into new types of music; listening more, paying more. And stupid things like overpriced singles would be a thing of the past; crappy EPs obviously aren't going to get repeat play, so artists would be rewarded for songs that were listened to more frequently, not just purchased once. Wouldn't that benefit a lot of indie artists? I think so. I know Rhapsody is kind of like this now, but

I'm not necessarily saying that this is a good idea, just thinking out loud on one possibility for what music distribution might look like someday. Obviously it would never be as egalitarian as I describe above - each song costing the same, low amount, all artists being available through this service, etc.

Josh M sent me this, which is well worth watching: