My first thought upon diving into the massive NEIL YOUNG ARCHIVES, which went online Friday with streamable, high-res versions of pretty much everything he's ever released (and more), and which is either beautifully or strangely designed (or both), and either incredibly fun or frustrating to navigate (or both), and which is currently free but will soon convert to a subscription model (price TBD), was, why doesn't every artist do this? My second thought: Wait, what if every artist did do this? Would you pay $9.99 a month for access to everything your favorite artist has ever released, recorded and or demo'd? Would you pay $5.99? $1.99? What would you pay for your second favorite artist? Or your 72nd favorite artist? Can you imagine a world where you had to separately pay each and every artist whose music you want to hear on demand? Crazy, right? But I can imagine that, and so can you. That's how the actual world worked until less than 20 years ago. Ten or 15 bucks for on-demand access to a single CD's worth of songs. And 10 or 15 bucks again if you wanted to hear another. How on earth could anyone afford to eat in 2005? The Neil Young Archives is kind of fabulous, though. It looks like Neil, smells like Neil, offers top-shelf fidelity (not that my laptop cares, but lots of people will) and contains all sorts of cool liner-note info (but, grrrr, did he have to put the songwriter's name in a smaller font than everything else? #21stCenturyMusicEconomyInANutshell) and other extras. I'd forego the occasional meal for it. Could/should ED SHEERAN do this? KENDRICK LAMAR? Your second favorite artist? Your 72nd? Do they do it instead of SPOTIFY or APPLE? Or in addition to those services, with bonuses for diehard fans? Do we want narrow and deep, or wide and shallow? Can we have both?... If TENCENT MUSIC and SPOTIFY were baseball players, Tencent might have a higher batting average but Spotify would have a way better OPS+. Or something like that. The former company, which rules the Chinese streaming market and whose parent company reportedly tried to buy Spotify earlier this year, dwarfs Spotify with its 700 million monthly users. But hardly any of them pay; Spotify's 60 million paid subscribers put Tencent to shame. That's presumably one of the reasons Tencent is interested in a deal in which the two companies would trade up to 10 percent of their stakes with each other. And Spotify's motive? "Spotify really, really feels that it needs that entry point into China" ahead of its public offering, suggests analyst MARK MULLIGAN. Industry observers have been waiting for the inevitable consolidation of streaming services. Is this the one they were expecting? Is this the one you were expecting?... LL COOL J on Sunday became the first rapper awarded a KENNEDY CENTER HONOR, with assistance from QUEEN LATIFAH and BUSTA RHYMES. The other music honorees were GLORIA ESTEFAN and LIONEL RICHIE... Sexual abuse allegations reach the classical world: The latest to fall is longtime METROPOLITAN OPERA conductor JAMES LEVINE... RIP MUNDELL LOWE and WILLIAM MAYER.