The founders got their start selling pirated software, but CD Projekt itself started as a legit importer and localiser. Their initial success was due to knowing that they needed to compete with pirates on quality and convenience because piracy was so prevalent in Poland.
I think big artists need to start doing what some large sporting events do and sell a significant proportion of tickets on a ballot system. Instead of being first come first served, anyone who registered to buy a ticket (possibly paying a deposit to disincentivize duplicate entries) would go in the draw for the opportunity to buy a ticket, preventing things turning into an auction benefiting those who have the fastest bots.
So you didn't get as rich as you could have and might not get to retire at 30, go live your life. A friend of mine and I both applied for a HFT firm out of university, he got in and I didn't, but based on how he described it over about 18 months working there, my greatest regret would have been taking that job, it sounded like a dismal place to work (with platinum handcuffs).
You lose out on the network effect with this solution.
If someone gets to pick who's allowed onto a network, then they won't bother using it. Maybe your friends will join since they are allowed to add _their_ friends, but those friends of friends wouldn't bother because most of their friends can't join, meaning your friends won't bother either unless they really want to talk to you specifically.
It would work for groups where most people know each other, but there are already options for that that allow users to be in groups that aren't all owned by the same person e.g. Discord, Signal, Facebook.
It would be interesting to see similar data for other large cities which posters on HN have been predicting/reporting mass exoduses from such as the Bay Area.
Even if it were possible to accurately attribute revenue to particular contributions, I could see this compensation model leading to short term thinking. For example a contribution may generate a lot of revenue now, but could end up costing more when a security hole causes you to lose all your customers data. And who will fix bugs that don't directly contribute to revenue? Or work on behind the scenes code which isn't directly monetizable? Maybe this could work as a factor in a bonus that is a small portion of total compensation, but as a driver of total compensation there are far too many issues.
My company was a fairly early adopter of Teams. I remember there being a user feedback forum that was such an optimistic place. Fixing notifications was one of the highest voted issues and the MS rep promised work was being done on it, but it never got fixed before we finally accepted the increased cost and moved to Slack.
The gap between off and on-license prices (i.e. supermarket versus bar) will differ depending on country as well. As anecdata, I found that in the UK, buying beer from a supermarket tended to be more expensive than my home country of New Zealand, but buying beer in a pub was usually cheaper. I guess in New Zealand we charge a much higher alcohol tax to on-licenses rather than off-licenses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Projekt#Founding