Overview:
Audius is a decentralized music streaming platform that connects musicians, fans, and node operators through token incentives to build a new music streaming experience. Currently, there are desktop versions, web versions, iOS versions, and Android versions.
Audius has more than 4 million monthly users and more than 200,000 daily views.
The music genres are mainly hip-hop and electronic.
Open API interface
Audio, images, chart data, etc. in Audius are all represented in the content ledger. Through the discovery node service, users can use any client to connect to Audius and view the same social graph.
App and DAPP developers can query, search (subscription feeds, artists, tracks, playlists), and transmit music streams in the Audius network to quickly build third-party clients. Currently, in addition to being used by third-party audio apps, Audius' API is also used in game virtual worlds, Metaverse virtual spaces, etc.
Audius is like a distributed, decentralized content repository, allowing third-party developers to easily extract content from the platform directory to build new dapps.
In addition to the official API interface, Audius encourages community members to expand or modify the core API interface. In the future, the Audius community will create an incentive economy around the discovery node API interface, which will allow the creator/maintainer of the interface to receive rewards.
User experience:
On the main interface of Audius, users can obtain current popular trends through the people they follow and the rankings, and collect and forward their favorite musicians and streaming works, which is consistent with the experience of traditional streaming software.
Users can create their own unique playlists and forward them to their daily social networks. When the playlists gain popularity and enter the rankings, Audius pays incentives for the network value created by users.
Among the features that may appear in the future, users can pay to enter the VIP community, meet idols face to face, experience exclusive content and offline privileges, and invest in music NFTs to earn returns, or add their own unique remixes to the original music NFTs to construct NFTs that belong to fans themselves, just like Async Art.
For musicians, tracks can be uploaded for free and stored permanently on IPFS without hosting fees. In addition to promoting their own works on web2 social platforms, they can also pledge to establish VIP communities, interact with fans willing to pay, and tap into more potential income.
Short-term highlights & future roadmap:
advantage:
The user experience is basically the same as web2 streaming, with low entry barriers and high acceptance. At present, a certain user group and network effect have been formed. Among the products in the same track, it is the most mature and most easily accepted by the market.
Reconstruct the income system of musicians (eliminate the rent-seeking layer) and redistribute the income ratio, with 90% of the income provided to creators and 10% to node merchants.
Remixing of non-original music is allowed, and the copyright holder will automatically receive a certain percentage of the revenue.
Rebuilding a new social system with artist tokens and NFTs as the core functions will allow fans to return control to musicians and form a staggered competition with traditional streaming media.
The open API gives Audius the advantage of composability, making it part of the web3 Lego building blocks for higher adoption rates.
Decentralized storage guarantees the data ownership of musicians and users, and project teams and nodes are not eligible to delete or modify data at will.
shortcoming:
Web2 social platforms generally do not support Audius well.
There are few available templates for traffic distribution, and currently it can only be promoted through web2 social media, which does not provide much help to unknown independent musicians.
Apart from receiving official incentives by being on the charts, there are currently no other income options for musicians (disocord officials responded that they are under development).
The music genres are not diverse, and the musicians and tracks are mainly hip-hop and electronic.
The Audius platform is designed to be decentralized and censorship-resistant, but it is also designed to be accessible to home creators, which means that copyright issues may arise.
The author uploaded the audio and experienced the process. Although the platform provides third-party channels to obtain art pictures as covers, they are basically unsuccessful in searching and the functions are not perfect.
There is no clear roadmap at this time.
Features that are clearly stated in the white paper but not yet implemented:
It is planned to introduce stablecoin payments to ensure the interests of network participants and minimize financial risks.
It is planned to introduce artist tokens to expand the interactivity between the musician community and fans. The tokens can be distributed directly by Audius or through distribution platforms such as Roll, Zora and Rally.
Due to the high gas fees of Ethereum, innovations centered on artist tokens and NFTs cannot be carried out smoothly. You can pay attention to the progress of the vision after the Audius content network is migrated to Solnana (no detailed route plan is currently seen on the official website).
Audius & traditional streaming:
Traditional streaming platforms pay copyright fees to creators based on the number of views. Taking the royalty rate in 2020 as an example, most platforms pay about $0.006 for each piece of streaming content. This means that for every 170,000 views accumulated by a creator's work, he or she can earn $1,000, and in reality, he or she often gets less. Ironically, artists' main income often comes from touring, not streaming copyright income.
On the other hand, in order to meet market demand, musicians can often only select a small amount of music that caters to market standards when designing albums. A large amount of unexposed music is stored on hard drives and never "sees the light of day" throughout their entire career.
Audius adopts a free hosting model, allowing musicians to freely publish all their works (copyright). When their popularity accumulates to a certain level, they can also choose to pledge a certain amount of $Audio to unlock exclusive functions for interacting with fans (fan control). Enthusiastic fans pay for their idols, personally participate in music production and enjoy offline privileges. The rich returns further encourage musicians to pledge to unlock more functions (income), and finally the value is fed back to the Audius protocol, promoting the positive development of the protocol.
Another point worth mentioning is that the Audio economic model is non-rent-seeking. If you hold a certain amount of tokens, whether for speculation or use, you can enjoy the corresponding VIP level, attracting various users to use it to listen to music, thus creating value for the network.
For music, the definition of web3 is to return copyright, pricing power, and fan control to the musicians themselves.
The biggest problem facing musicians is how to achieve mature traffic distribution and expand their network influence, which may require integration with the Metaverse. A single spark can start a prairie fire, and the huge innovation that creators have unleashed in web3 is exactly what everyone is looking forward to.
Audius is more like something built on a freemium model. It's not trying to compete with other streamers on price per stream, which is a zero-sum game. Number of streams does not equal profit. Over time, the value of the stream economy continues to decline and inevitably returns to zero. Artists are looking for any way to increase their income.
No matter how big a musician's fan base is, fans are willing to spend $1 to build a new connection with their idol rather than 99 cents to buy the right to play a song on a streaming platform. 10 real fans are more valuable than 1,000 fake fans.
Among the fans of musicians, 1%-5% are willing to pay for offline privileges and exclusive content (music production process, unreleased tracks, lyrics, small remix competitions). For example, a musician with a million monthly plays may eventually earn $3,000 on traditional streaming platforms, while hundreds of fans in his community are willing to pay $10 per month for exclusive interaction with their idol. This sense of participation creates a deeper bond between fans and idols, and the income is no less than that of streaming, and there is still huge room for exploration.
Audius wants to be a small part of the music market, not a large part of the crypto market. Capturing mainstream audiences is Audius' goal.
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