I. Project background
Audius is a blockchain-based multi-centralized music sharing platform that aims to remove the intermediate links and additional costs of music streaming services, thus allowing artists to directly get their due revenue from their works. It facilitates direct transactions between listeners and artists, giving everyone the freedom to distribute, monetize, and stream unstoppable audio.
Roniel Rumburg, CEO of Audius, benchmarked Audius against SoundCloud, suggesting, “It was SoundCloud’s opportunity to lose and now it’s ours.” With blockchain technology, Audius solves centralization and transparency issues to return the control power and creativity to the artists, eliminating the high fees universal across platforms for uploading songs and such incidents as removing songs uploaded by users for review.
Audius founder Ranidu Lankage is a Sri Lankan pop music artist. At the age of 19, he set a platinum sales record with the album “Oba Magemai” and even ushered in a new era of “Sinhalese” pop music.
However, after Sony successfully released his first album, Ranidou Lankaje chose to “work on his own” in order to maintain control of his work. He and Roniel Rumburg and Forrest Browning, the other two co-founders, believed that blockchain technology could improve the current centralization and transparency issues in the music industry, and help artists regain control and creativity over their own works.
II. Project profile
1. Project overview
Audius currently has 750,000 monthly active users (MAU), more than 100,000 track resources and more than 1 million pieces of playback content. Audius has now reached cooperation with top artists such as deadmau5, 3LAU, RAC, etc., to jointly popularize encrypted assets in this field.
Artists can publish their content on the Audius blockchain for free. This blockchain is essentially a “database” of the music on the platform. Other music service providers can also access the database and index it.
The biggest feature of Audius is that it directly connects music artists with listeners or fans, and allows artists to receive a transparent and reasonable remuneration, which is particularly important when they are treated unfairly. Audius is free and will not remove songs - in case of a copyright dispute, it will send the copyright complaint directly to the uploader and take measures to redistribute revenue instead of removing the work.
2. Project features
(1) Secure. With Audius, artists can generate immutable and timestamped records for their creative works, secured by an incentive-aligned decentralized network of node operators.
(2) Permanently free, with high-quality audio. Audius provides clear streaming media at a speed of 320kbps; artists can upload unlimited works, free of charge forever without any conditions;
(3) With tokens to unlock advanced functions. Artists can use the platform token AUDIO to unlock advanced functions or exclusive services, obtain voting rights from listeners or fans who share works, and participate in Audius protocol governance;
(4) Governable. As a platform owned and operated by its users, the future of Audius is entirely driven by $AUDIO governance. Everything about Audius is governable, with the voting weight directly correlated to $AUDIO staked for value-added services.
3. About the token
Audius has two tokens, i.e. the governance token AUDIO and the platform token Loud. The following is about its governance token AUDIO.
Official website: https://audius.co/
Listing time: October 2020
Type: ERC20
Token distribution:
(1) Community airdrop: 55 million AUDIO (5.50%)
(2) Foundation: 180 million AUDIO (18.00%)
(3) Team and consultants: 405 million AUDIO (40.50%)
(4) Investment institutions: 360 million AUDIO (36.00%)
Token usage:
Users can deposit tokens to run nodes and participate in governance, or enjoy exclusive services.
Listing exchanges: CoinEx, Binance, FTX, and UniSwap
III. Marketing and communities
https://twitter.com/AudiusProject
Discord
https://discord.com/invite/audius
IV. Fund-raising
Audius secured $3.1 million in Series A funding led by Multicoin Capital and partners of Blockchange Ventures, with involvement from Pantera Capita, Collab+Currenc, and Coinbase Ventures. In addition, on October 23, 2020, Binance led a $1.25 million extension round for Audius.
V. Project progress
Audius hopes to change the economic paradigm of the music industry through blockchain, and has successfully attracted a considerable number of music creators and listeners to use its platform products. In addition, the project developer plans to combine digital music with NFT to inject more possibilities into digital music. Currently, the Audius website and APP have been officially launched.
It is reported that all streaming media on the current Audius platform are completely free, but its paid infrastructure is under construction, which aims to help new artists profit from paid music content, a move to further promote the platform. Music creators can host their works on Audius for free, and then profit from their own streaming.
As Audius announced in March 2021, 33 rappers have joined since the release of its community program CROWD FAVORITE.
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