This definitely should be an ongoing discussion. I haven’t personally experienced anxiety about my credits, because I know that I could never be charged beyond the total amount of credits I have. There’s no “overdraft fees”.
I could feel surprised by running out of them when I wasn’t expecting it, but so far my experience has generally been the opposite – my credits have lasted way way longer than expected. But it’s important to note that some people like yourself find the model a bit anxiety-inducing; I don’t think that should be ignored.
I’ve fretted about how little artists make while browsing for artists (and listening to tracks only at the tiny first-play pay rate). However, I think we have good reason to believe that once Resonate Player has more advanced music discovery tools, this issue would be minimized. That “exploration” pay rate would still serve its purpose, but listeners would much more likely find music they love.
In my view, Resonate’s business model depends on some level of “matchmaking” success – helping a given listener find music they enjoy. We don’t want this process to be soullessly algorithmic (delivering them to one genre over and over for example). And we also don’t want to put all the burden of music discovery on the listener themselves.
That current user burden on the beta platform is nearly guaranteed to be a temporary factor. It was never intended to be more than a beta platform. This burden will surely go away when the new player is launched – bit by bit we will have more music discovery tools, curation, human-centric algorithms, and user interactions – all of which will significantly smooth the process to exploring Resonate’s catalogue and listeners finding music they want to listen to again and again.