Audius: A New Spotify?

The entertainment industry has been completely overrun by the cryptocurrency industry, which also includes the music industry. Here is everything you need to know about Audius, a music streaming service built on the blockchain that combines music and blockchain technology.

Unquestionably, most people in the globe enjoy listening to music, and as a result, the worldwide music industry earns billions of dollars annually. There have been worries that musicians aren’t getting paid appropriately for their labour, given the joys and solace that music brings to so many people’s lives and the importance of the money that is made every year. Howey, Audius (AUDIO) thinks that closing this gap might be possible through crypto integration with the music business. It has therefore attempted to develop a decentralised music streaming and sharing protocol that is

what is Audius?

Audius appears to have the ability to pose a threat to the highly competitive music streaming market, which has an estimated 445 million users from across the world. This causes us to wonder if it is a Spotify competitor or if a brand-new Spotify has indeed appeared.

In essence, Audius is a decentralised protocol that is community-driven and targeted towards music streaming services. By giving artists proper rights and the ability to monetize their work, Audius is implementing potential infrastructures to decentralise and democratise the music business. The blockchain-based music platform is actively working to become the blockchain equivalent of Spotify or SoundCloud.

How Does Audius Work?

As previously stated, Audius is a decentralised blockchain-powered music streaming network that aims to give musicians their rightful compensation and control back. However, it’s crucial to realise that Audius, by bypassing record labels and intermediaries who would have increased the artists’ costs, is able to decentralise the music business by linking these musicians directly with their fans. It enables music producers to upload and make money from their work without having to be affiliated with a label or any other middleman. Additionally, Audius offers choices for music creators to select how they want to commercialise their content. They can decide to sell their tracks as non-fungible tokens or offer content and streams for free with the option of a one-time purchase to unlock all content (NFTs).

Due to Audius’ non-profit nature, artists are able to maximise their earnings. Particularly, 90% of the proceeds from sales go to the performers, with the remaining 10% going to the network’s node operators for maintenance. However, Audius is able to maintain its viability through funding rounds and the AUDIO coin, which rewards workers and early investors. It appears to be independent of the artists’ income.

Technically speaking, content nodes and discovery nodes are the two categories of decentralised nodes that secure and maintain Audius. While the discovery nodes index the same content, the content nodes act as a host for the musical contents.

The native AUDIO coin, an ERC-20 token based on Ethereum, powers the Audius Network. It ensures.

Audius History and Roadmap

Two computer scientists named Roneil Rumburg and Forrest Browning co-founded Audius in 2018. They both hold degrees from elite universities and have been involved in the cryptocurrency industry since its infancy. The pair chose to work together to begin building the music/crypto project because they are both fans of electronic music and seasoned crypto professionals.

A few months after its invention, the platform held a Series A round in the same year that saw participation from General Catalyst, Lightspeed, and Pantera Capital and helped it raise approximately $5.5 million. The Audius mainnet became live in the final trimester of 2019.

Features of Audius

The network is empowered and secured by two different types of nodes on the Audius platform. Content nodes and Discovery nodes are some of these nodes. The platform also includes AudSP and Content ledger as additional mechanisms.

Content Nodes

Without the artist’s involvement, these nodes are utilised to automatically host, retain, safeguard, and manage content. For the benefit of the music creator, these nodes perform only with a primary focus on preserving the accessibility of the musical content. They can be managed by node operators who also have a network stake in place or by the artists who host their own content.

Discovery Nodes

These nodes concentrate on enabling a fan to find musical content on the network. It serves as a tool for indexing metadata that users may quickly search for across the internet.

Content Ledger

The Audius Content Ledger gives artists on the Audius network a decentralised method to manage their revenue splits, track content, and determine who owns what. Additionally, it guarantees simple accessibility thanks to its constant audio quality and metadata format specification.

AudSP

In order to distribute files throughout the Audius protocol, this serves as a decentralised storage mechanism. It ensures that the platform has a democratic user interface and enables a comfortable user experience that is straightforward, easy to use, and highly scalable.

AUDIO Token

The native token of the Audius network is AUDIO, as was previously stated. It is an ERC-20 token built on Ethereum. The protocol’s long-term value is AUDIO’s primary concern, and they are staked as collateral for value-added services. AUDIO had the 99th-largest market cap of all cryptocurrencies in 2021.

Use Cases of Audius

The Audius ecosystem’s utility token, AUDIO, primarily serves the three functions of governance, security, and a rewards system.

Users on the Audius network must stake AUDIO tokens in order to be eligible and receive rewards. Furthermore, the tokens serve as the platform’s governance tokens, allowing users to vote on and propose prospective network upgrades. Owners of the token are given the opportunity to access on-platform exclusive content.

Benefits of Audius

The Audius platform is preferred by musicians because it offers perks only available to music enthusiasts and producers on the network. These are its advantages:

It enables musicians to earn the most money possible and to enjoy their earnings the most.

It eliminates difficulties brought on by middlemen’s involvement and their audience.

As it offers rewards for running nodes, it enables users to receive a portion of network fees.

It grants users sole voting privileges.

It makes it easier for musicians to market their skills to a larger audience.

Conclusion

Music creators that want to take advantage of the breakthrough blockchain-powered music streaming services now turn to Audius as their go-to platform.

Although the platform is still in its early stages of development, experts believe it has the ability to surpass the music business in the near future. However, the platform is working to maximise profits for artists while ensuring that artists receive just pay for selling their abilities.