Audius: What It Is & How It Works
Spotify meets blockchain sounds like a great combination. A decentralized service where artists and musicians can get a fair reward for their work can be industry-disrupting. Let's see more about What Audius is and how it works.
The music streaming industry is enormous, with more than 400 million subscribers worldwide, earning more than $14b a year and an expected annual growth rate of 6.9%. It's projected to be a $20b industry by 2027.
However, it's not all music and games (pun intended) when it comes to streaming services. Critics feel artists aren't fairly compensated for their work and that smaller performers and songwriters depend on large corporations to be seen and heard.
And they might be right, after all, only 12% of all the music industry revenue goes to artists, and they have minimal control over how their music is distributed and what they can create.
That's the problem Audius is looking to solve. A blockchain-powered streaming and sharing protocol that's looking to give power back to artists on how they distribute and monetize their music by connecting them directly with their fans.
What's Audius 🎧
Audius is a decentralized music streaming service that combines streaming and social media into one product. Founded in 2018, it's developed with musicians in mind and allows artists to upload their songs to the apps and connect directly with their fans.
Originally built on the POA Network (and Ethereum sidechain), it has moved most of its parts to the Solana blockchain. Developers can also develop their apps on top of Audius, getting access to their music catalog.
When uploaded to the blockchain, artists get an immutable, time-stamped record of their creative work secured by a decentralized network of node operators.
The distributed nature of the platform means that ownership, upkeep, and governance rest not with labels and music corporations but with the platform's active users.
Audius is a music co-op with their native token as a bridge between the three groups that power the network: node operators, artists, and fans.
And what's available on Audius 🎶
As a music platform, one of the most prevalent questions fans have is, "does it have good music?" Audis has a catalog of more than 200.000 songs and is built with content from deadma5, Katy Perry, Steve Aoki, Jason Derulo, and NAS, to name a few as well as other indie artists.
Another characteristic of the platform is that artists are encouraged to collaborate through remixes to find exclusive content.
Everything about the $AUDIO token 🪙
As with all blockchain projects, Audius is powered by the $AUDIO token, an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token. That has four main functionalities.
The first one is security. Node operators stake AUDIO tokens to run a node and get rewards from the network.
Audius features a 7% automatic annual issuance rate distributed on-chain and every week. $AUDIO rewards are distributed on-chain directly to node operators
Artists also get premium features by staking the token, such as displaying NFTs on their sites.
Then there's the governance aspect that allows users that stake their tokens to vote on the proposal and shape the platform's future.
Finally, artists are rewarded with AUDIO tokens. The platform rewards the most played songs, those that get the most downloads, and those artists that interact the most with their communities and the project.
According to their whitepaper, they might be bringing stablecoins to allow fans an easier way to pay for premium content.
To date, Audius has distributed more than 50 million $AUDIO tokens to users and artists that have collaborated with the platform whered through uploading content, building newly featured, or getting the most weekly plays. The tokens are meant to be distributed on an ongoing basis in perpetuity as new coins are minted and added to the supply.
Audius is proving that crypto and Web3 projects don't need to work in a vacuum for only crypto fans and that they can have an easy entry point for people across the globe.
With a TikTok partnership under their belt that connects them with the 1 billion monthly active users the social media platform has, Audius is looking to be the next Tidal, but with all artists in mind.
Audius is part of the Arch Media Index that tracks the performance of the Web3 entertainment sector. You can see how the industry is performing and how each of the tokens perform here.