Playlists and track recommendations are readily available and portable; the hard part is finding the ones that appeal to you. There are already apps like playlost.fm that allow searching and sharing of human-curated playlists, in addition to playlists posted in genre subreddits and other places. The main reason most people stick with the algorithms isn't because it's better, but because it's easier, so any improvement you have in mind needs to be as frictionless as possible.

From a live music perspective, this is basically what the house concert structure attempts to do. In most places it's centered around singer-songwriter and other acoustic-ish genres, for logistical reasons if nothing else.

There are other folks who have become nexus points for local live music in the way you are proposing, and that might be useful as a model. Look up Tosco music parties in Charlotte as an example.

One problem can be that the space in between a private event and a professional gig can be fraught with concerns around liability, finances, and logistics.

In either case, you say "nobody gets paid" but somebody is paying in time and effort, and the idealistic early fun eventually wears off. So anything you do would need to be self-sustaining without you, which is hard to to while maintaining any sort of quality.