Audius is a decentralized music streaming platform. Like Spotify or SoundCloud, but on blockchain.
They are working closely with world-famous DJs like deadmau5, RAC, 3LAU and also with Bing Gordan (Co-founder of EA Games), Justin Kan (Co-founder of Twitch) to name a few. Their token which is called as AUDIO has skyrocketed by 20X in the past.
What is Audius?
Audius is a decentralized music streaming platform designed with artists and fans at the forefront, rather than record levels and big companies. Their mission is to get everyone the freedom to share, monetize and listen to any audio they want and whenever they want.
Why Audius?
Here are the key benefits that Audius offers;
- Censorship resistance: It is important because it protects the users from getting their songs and accounts ban.
- Discoverability and sharing: It lets more artist control over who their music is shared and discovered.
- Closer with Fan: It lets artist have more direct ownership over the relationship with their fans.
- Better payments: A bigger payment for artist and everyone. A bigger Pie of profit for the artist with transparency and fast transactions.
These may sound like a normal benefit to you, but if you read their white paper’s problem section or do your own research about how the music industry works, you can get a glimpse to all the middle man involved and webs of restrictions that holds back artists from getting their fair share.
So, Audius is tackling a huge music industry problem that has lots of thorny issues. And they have been doing this since 2018 when they first started. They’ve hit several big milestones on their roadmap, and that calumniated with their public launch on October 2020. Yes, that means their app is completely live and operational. I even tried it out and listen to some songs, and it sounds great to me. So, I give them thumbs up from end user perspective. However, their app needs much more improvement, which I hope they will do it in the near future.
Audius Crypto (AUDIO)
The Audius has their own token called as Audius crypto or AUDIO. Audius crypto sits in the middle of everything in Audius decentralized music streaming platform. So, what exactly Audius crypto is used for? The Audius network consist of 4 main components,
- Content Ledger: It tracks the songs that artist publishes and other important info like metadata.
- Content nodes: They are user operated and host the actual music file.
- Discovery nodes: It indexes the content so that their user can easily discover and browse what’s available on the platform.
- And their token: It serves as incentives to all the varies participants.
So, the Audius token is used primarily for security, feature access and governance. Node operators have to stake it to participate, and as a result they receive a cut of network fees for the service. The more they stake, the higher the discoverability in the network.
Artist can also use this token to unlock various features like membership tokens and badges, and fans can delegate some token for their favorite artists in order to share in their future growth.
Anyone who stakes AUDIO gets to vote on the proposal from where Audius goes in the future. These are just some initial examples, but more use cases will be added in the future. So, definitely something to keep an eye on.
The total token supply is a bit over 1 billion Audius token, with only a small amount currently circulating. The rest will be distributed to communities, investors, team and foundation.
Pros & Cons of Audius:
Every System comes with their own positive & negative aspects, and Audius is no exception. Although in my opinion the Audius has so much potential but nevertheless it has some drawbacks too. Let’s discuss some pros and cons of Audius.
Pros of Audius
- Firstly, I liked the idea behind the product as an end user. As I was researching Audius for this article, I was streaming music from their platform (app) on the background, it worked fine, and I enjoyed the music selection too.
- Second, I like how the AUDIO token has many use cases for all the various participants and ecosystem. The more stronger the use cases for the token, the more demand there will be. And more demand generally means the price will incline.
- Their plans for social tokens, DeFi integrations, NFT marketplace and micropayments makes me excited about the future of Audius.
- Finally, I like their team as well. Specially their team of advisors. If the advisors actively contribute and not just sit back and lend the reputation, then I think that it will drastically improve the project’s chance of success.
Cons of Audius
Disclaimer: It is to be noted that Audius is still relevantly new and lots of improvement is happening on the platform. So, the cons of the platform are just for the time being, and I am very optimistic that all the issues mentioned below will get resolved by their team.
Firstly, I think their permission less nature is a double edge sword. Because they can’t remove the content even if it violates copy right laws. As a matter of fact, if you look through the platform, you can find some users uploading copy right contents.
Now, Audius mentioned that in the future, the community can remove the content through the arbitration system. But then is it really Censorship resistant? I guess we have to wait to find out how will that will play out.
The platform is supposed to be owned and operated by users. But that’s not likely to happen in my opinion because of the governance rules and the token distributions.
Essentially the 10,000 users who got the initial airdrop, a very small percentage like 3% actually ended up staking their tokens. Collectively, they hold 1.5% of the voting weight for the entire network. Not only that but a wallet also needs 1% of the vote to make a proposal and right now that amounts to few million dollars’ worth of AUDIO.
So, you can get the sense that how little of voice users have so far and how few of them are actively participating in governance. That is not good for the platform, which is supposed to be a community driven.
Lastly, there’s just a lot of issues with rewards and monetization that they need to figure out. Some users are unhappy with various aspects of the current system. Like how the top five trending songs get weekly rewards right now, and everyone else gets nothing. Or how artists have to compete with simple curators who just put together playlists for the rewards. Not to mention that these rewards are also being gamed pretty heavily by fake accounts and bots currently.
Generally speaking, some users just doesn’t like how other features are being prioritized above artist payouts and monetization.
I will say, though, it does seem like the Audius team is moving to address these concerns as fast as they can. They had a bot’s problem that affected their trending feeds a few months ago. But that bot problem got solved.
We have to bear in mind that this project is relatively new, so let’s be patient and hopefully many of these issues will be ironed out soon.
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Some Stats for Audius crypto
| Audius crypto price (AUDIO) | $3.04 |
| Market Cap | $1,228,824,874.59 |
| Fully Diluted Market Cap | $3,203,819,114.03 |
| Circulating Supply | 400,244,277.00 AUDIO |
| Market Rank | #81 |
Is Audius a good investment?
When evaluating a crypto project, I personally like to assess the team, if they are the one that they can lead us to the promise land. I took a look and I think they are decent, Silicon Valley background, engineers, co-founder and entrepreneurial streak. And more importantly they are backed by top investors like Coinbase Ventures, Block change, Standard Crypto to name a few which means they have ton of support and the best part is their advisors includes some big names like DJs and other key players in the entertainment, music and streaming world.
So, is it a good investment? I don’t know, but one thing is clear, that the future of Music industry will be decentralized. Simply because of poor management of traditional music industry, where lots of artists had to suffer for various reasons. Audius is trying to provide the platform for the artist that they were looking for, in which the artist gets their fair share of credit and finance.
The goal of Audius is ambitious and if they can fulfill those goals then certainly it has lots of potentials. But whether they will be able to do it or not, I guess we have to wait and watch.
Disclaimer: I am not a crypto investment expert, so you should do your own due diligence and consult with the real crypto investment expert before investing. All crypto investment involves risk and the crypto market is very volatile so, please be very careful. This article should not be taken as an evidence for investment, rather general knowledge on Audius.
