yeah, currently, paying for subscriptions has to be done out of band like https://nostr.wine and so forth there needs to be a custom relay with web service designed for this purpose, then you could have a "subscription npub" and you zap it and it automatically subscribes you and you get read access to those events
note that because nostr is "leaky" (it's impossible to partition the data) this is a system of advance access because anyone with a subscription can republish people would still go for this i think, because it guarantees early access, even if the popular ones are probably gonna percolate and go viral if they are virus worthy