What is Audius?

Audius is a decentralised music-streaming protocol based on a public blockchain infrastructure and other decentralised technologies. Audius cuts out the middlemen in the music business, directly connecting artists to their fans. It is run by an open-source community, including fans, artists, and developers.

Audius is a token economy supported by the Audius platform token (AUDIO), third-party stablecoins, and artist tokens. It offers a decentralised storage solution and a ledger for the exchange of audio and metadata. Users may utilise a one-of-a-kind track encryption technique combined with a programmable system for unlocking specific proxy re-encryption keys for their material.

It is a discovery protocol that allows users to query metadata easily and a decentralised governance protocol in which artists, node operators, and fans are individually and collectively empowered to decide on protocol updates and upgrades.

A brief history of Audius

Roneil Rumburg (CEO) and Forrest Browning (Chief Product Officer) created Audius in January 2018. Rumburg was formerly engaged with Backslash, a Bitcoin peer-to-peer (P2P) payments firm. Browning was a member of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. He was a co-founder of Stacksware prior to Audius.

Audius raised funds via a Venture Round and a Series A round. Audius tokens (AUDIO) are given through airdrop with a set genesis allotment and continual governance changeable issuance. The top 10,000 artists and fans received 50 million AUDIO, or 5% of the entire 1 billion supply. According to the number of streams, 75% of the money went to the artists. AUDIO trading at US$0.16 during the airdrop was worth roughly US$8 million.

Pantera Capital, Multicoin Capital, Lightspeed China Partners, Coinbase Ventures, and Binance Labs are a few of the investors in Audius.

How Audius works

Audius is a music-streaming platform for all musicians to share their work and build their fan base, monetising on their creativity without needing a label or to sign a deal. Audius is a music-streaming ecosystem that has three participants: artists, node operators, and fans. Musicians and producers have complete control over the distribution, revenue, and streaming rights to their music, and the AUDIO token serves a crucial role in the Audius network by enabling a shared economy.

The platform consists of several elements: the Audius token (AUDIO), stablecoins, artist tokens, content nodes, the content ledger, discovery nodes, and governance. Content nodes are user-operated and handle the hosting of content as well as access to it. The content ledger has several layers: The Ethereum blockchain, the POA network, and the Layer-1 or Layer-2 blockchain networks. It serves as the system's brain and as the centrepiece of the Audius protocol.

Additionally, Audius offers SoundCloud, which helps artists monetise their work in creative ways by better engaging true fans.

What is Audius (AUDIO) used for?

The AUDIO token allows fans and artists to unlock exclusive features on the platform. Artists can leverage AUDIO to grow and better engage their fan base, and fans can pay to listen to the music tracks on the platform. By staking AUDIO, artists can access content distribution tools to distribute their artist tokens to fans, who can directly support artists with AUDIO tokens.

AUDIO enables network security, exclusive feature access, and community-owned governance. With AUDIO, users have a voice in the platform’s future through active contributions to the network. Any artists who wish to use the Audius network to distribute and market their music tracks must agree to the network's open licence. It is crucial since, once they agree to the open licence, their music will be accessible for streaming on the larger network.

Once the music content is accessible on the larger network, the network's content permissions component manages its availability. When a fan requests that a music track be played, a request is issued to the artist's chosen content node from their client. Unlike other music-streaming platforms, the number of track plays does not determine artists' proceeds.