Hey everyone! A few days ago I noticed a tweet from the Binance account announcing their investment in Audius, a blockchain-enabled streaming service that connects music fans with artists. Basically think Spotify and Soundcloud and connect it with blockchain technology. A few hours later Binance conveniently announced they'll also be listing Audius on their exchange, from what it seemed their currency had just been released and a smart contract on Uniswap blew up after the Binance listing announcement.
Here's that top before the Binance listing came into effect:
I refrained from posting about it then cause it seemed way overbought and figured better not get any potential readers to FOMO into it and end up losing some short term gains from the crazy uniswap pump. Now it's been almost a week since and I figured I'd get into writing a bit about some research I did on the project and tested out their app and mobile version. Here's what the chart looks like today on Binance, like always this isn't financial advice, etc, read more and make sure to do your own research and never invest more than you can afford to lose. Especially during times like these with most eyes on Bitcoin it probably is not the best idea to go into alts too much until BTC either stabilizes or reaches previous or a new ATH - the run up to that and after is probably going to be a better time to speculate on alts - especially those with unique propositions and hype around it. Having Binance as an investor would also not hurt, I may make some posts in the near future of which those projects are and what they do.
Anyway, here's the how the price developed over the past week after the listing:
Alright before we get into some Tokenomics, I also need to mention that aside from Binance they've also had private investors from some big players such as Multicoin Capital, Blockchange Ventures, Pantera Capital and Coinbase Ventures. Co-Founder and CEO Roneil Rumburg mentions in a Cointelegraph article that it brings the platform's total investment up to $9.8 million which is quite a nice sum for this kind of start up and he says they will use the funds to help artists grow and to expand their listener base while I assume also eliminating some of the middlemen that the music industry is plagued by.
To name a few problems that artists face when going through Spotify or Apple Music is the concept of "black box royalties", a definition of that according to a source on songtrust.com means:
Also known as Black Box Income, these are unclaimed royalties for which a publisher or writer is named but cannot be traced by a collection society. Writers who are owed royalties but cannot be found are often referred to as "lost" writers. Many US songwriters who sell their music internationally but are not signed to a publishing company with representation abroad, often become "lost" writers and lose their mechanical royalties. This income may come from the result of audits, adjustments or international sources.
Not only does this mean that artists have to wait for random sources to claim their royalties for them to collect their cut but on top of all the other distributors and managers they'll be lucky to get a fraction of a cent compared to them. Even with a great listener base they may often do worse than people think when it comes to streaming alone, which during these times with the pandemic and lack of tours it can be one of their main sources of income.
Tokenomics
Audius is built on Ethereum, here's their token contract currently showing 4129 address holders. Be your own judge if you think you're still early or not. Looking at the addresses the what I assume is the issuer address owns 88% of the total supply that will exist of 1 billion AUDIO governance token. Binance being second on the richlist with close to 35 million coins, which seems to be the exchange wallet.
Audius.org is their official website that has a lot of info about the governance token and what the project does. Here's some important parts to mention from it.
Artists can generate immutable and timestamped records of their works which is secured by a network of node operators. To find more info on how to set up a node and what kind of hardware it takes, you can find some info on their github, I'm not that techsavvy myself so won't be able to help you out with how staking works, if this will just reward you for helping secure the network or if this is needed/required to stake your current holdings. Won't be able to get too much into that but maybe someone with more info can help you out in the comment section or in another more technical post about Audius which I'll link here if I find one on Hive.
Some of these next parts are probably best to just paste in here instead of writing them in my own words:
At first glance it'll probably get you to thinking that it's quite a lot like $hive and $leo as well. Too bad similar projects that were created here kind of went AWOL cause I believe they had the same idea but didn't continue evolving/improving (such as the @dsound project).
The token won't just be there for the security of the chain through community-owned governance which is kind of the new hype as we've seen with tokens such as $rari. With $audio you'll also be able to access exclusive features and also earn $audio through activities by both artists and users/listeners. How exactly that works is not obvious as of yet. After registering on their website I was faced with the "our platform is currently under heavy load" even though I registered with Twitter which they recommended for a better user experience than registering directly with Metamask which btw @leofinance nowadays also offers and I'm hoping it'll start getting some more eth users onto our platform through it.
The protocol will live forever, owned and operated by a decentralized community of artists, developers, and fans collaborating to defend the world’s music catalog.
Blockchain in a nutshell, basically.
Looking at the few ways you can use your token one thing seems obvious, if it wasn't already after I mentioned that the token exists on Ethereum;
To run discovery or content nodes.
Providers get a higher probability of fan discovery and a share of network fees for securing the network.
To unlock exclusive features and services.
Artists may unlock services like artist tokens and badges, and receive voting power from fans who want to share in their success.
voting power huh?
To participate in protocol governance and shape the future of Audius.
Every aspect of Audius is governable, creating a truly community-owned and operated streaming service.
I'm not really all too sure what exactly they'll mean by this, I mean what kind of decisions could $audio holders decide on in this platform? Guess it remains to be seen. Possibly there's more info about the possibilities that enables in their whitepaper if you're interested enough in reading it or if you're thinking about investing in the token you may want to.
Alright, to finish this off here's a quick look at their main dapp which reminds me quite a lot of soundcloud.com.
As you can see I signed up through Twitter which was quite easy but so far by the selection of songs I'm not too impressed. Only familiar name I found was Skrillex but couldn't find any verification anywhere if it was actually him posting his new songs on there (I'm assuming artists will start by just posting new songs on there due to contracts or whatever else Spotify/etc prevents them from sharing on other experimental platforms - who knows). Another thing I was surprised after I heard that Deadmau5 was promoting Audius on Twitter and Twitch (where he btw got banned from but was doing a stream (of which I can't find the video of, only a few clips) on the Audius account, anyway I was surprised he hadn't uploaded any songs onto Audius yet:
Maybe it's "just that early" phase still and there'll be more to come. The hype died a bit down over the week with Bitcoin's bullish movements stagnating most alts - even Eth didn't perform as well as BTC this recent run so no surprises there.
Audius could be worth keeping an eye on, I'm interested to see how well they do once more popular artists with a bigger following start using it and what their opinions are of it compared to the predecessors, especially when it comes to earnings and the removal of middlemen.
One last image that can give you a good overview of the tokenomics is probably this which I found late on their website after I scrolled far enough but can't be bothered figuring out where in the post it would fit well so I'll just drop it here:
I'm assuming that for the private investors and much of the team's supply will be locked and unlocked periodically while the foundation and community will have theirs in their "hand" so to say earlier and throughout all time periods. This'll probably cause a nice circulation and exchange of owners over time through the exchanges so for long term investors this could be a good time to start average buying little at a time and see if you can get in at a good price. Currently the price is hovering at $0.11, starting off from $0.05 and pumping on Uniswap up to $0.70 on the first day before the Binance listing.
Do more research and let me know what you think about Audius and if you have any more info you felt I should've mentioned feel free to post it in the comment section and I'll vote it up to the top if it's informative. Thanks and thanks for reading!
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I'm coming at this from a musicians POV, as opposed to an investor. I'm getting my head round blockchain apps/cryptocurrencies, but I don't think I'll ever become a serious investor - my head just isn't wired that way. I can find my way round an exchange to trade, and that'll do me for now (though I suspect it'll slowly assimilate me into the investment mindset 😉 )
So I have this 'thing' that Spotify simply ain't for small, indie artists like me - regardless of what the business says.
As such, I'm starting to think about an alternative approach for artist like me to exist. (Actually that sounds a bit grand - I just think there's another way to do things, that may be enough for a lot of small artists not needing to live off the proceeds of their art)
As part of that, I'm on the lookout for other platforms, and obviously platforms in this Brave New World like Audius and Emanate may be part of the answer using cryptocurrencies (as we all want to make a bit of money, if only to cover 'running costs')
Hive itself is in the mix as well, obviously.
Anyway - there's a few things with Audius that niggle - no clear statement on how $AUDIO can be earned (or rather, at what rates - it's obvious they'll pay something for a stream, but what?), and what it can be used for (the 'airdrop' was a one off, apparently). Most folk hitting their Discord right now seem to be looking at ways of converting $AUDIO to fiat, and/or seeing how that can be done in the future. I'm a bit more relaxed than that. I'd be interested in seeing how they may let me use the token in the ecosystem, buying services from them or 3rd parties. Emanate are moving in that space as well - and I think it may have legs. These token could have some real value to artists, other than immediately dumping to fiat.
I did get a bit aerated when I found out the API will allow anyone to stream any track. i.e. They give your music away. Again, it's not clear if a play through the API counts as a stream (but I assume it would). Or, possibly more to the point, if a developer uses your music in an app that makes $$$, how the artist gets a fair share of that as a contributor.
But on reflection, it's not a great deal different from, for example, the SoundCloud API, so 🤷♂...
But, on the whole, I like it. I love the 'community owned' aspect with the promise of $AUDIO holders being able to guide and influence the growth - but I'm fascinated to see how they implement that. I like their vision, and there's some intersting things in the White Paper (but isn't there always? Remains to be seen what will actually make it). They have a solid platform (performance blips aside). To a layman like me they seem to have solid backing from folk who should know what they are doing.
And I've found some decent music on it.
So yeah, we'll keep an eye on this one, I think...
And, you get no points for being polite in this game, so I'll just leave this link here...
Ah, Mr G, was thinking this would grab your attention!
I don't even think Spotify is for the major artists as they only get a fraction of streaming revenue anyway once it's been filtered from Spotify to labels to the artists and so for folks like us with a small following, streaming royalties don't really count for much. Which is why I've been banging the crypto drum ever since I got in to it as it does offer a real opportunity in so many ways to reach goals that one thought was unattainable.
Spotify as well has pretty much commoditised music so it would be foolish in my opinion not to explore other options like we are doing now. I'd rather be on a smaller platform with a dedicated community that wants its userbase to succeed and use Spotify as a potential "lucky hit" to get on the editorial playlists.
Like you say, seems the general consensus on these apps from the Discord is "when cash out", which is to be expected, seems crypto is basically hopping from one shiny to the next but making a use case of the token and staking like on HIVE for a return or unlocking perks or downloading a track exclusively on the site will give it some buying demand.
I've learned that whitepapers are one thing, final product and delivery is something else but if they have the big investors backing them then it might well be a rare gem that delivers...
My first impressions of the site from just quickly browsing the other day were positive, even without an account - still not 100% I'll upload my music there but we shall see.
!ENGAGE 30
ENGAGEtokens.Ah yes, crypto music streaming sites. I've heard a lot about Audius recently and I'd agree that it sounds like Soundcloud mixed with Hive but I've not got an account. I know a couple of Hive artists on there - @gribbles @isaria @enginewitty - but so far I'm a little reluctant to join due to the nature of what happens with the music once it's uploaded.
Other than that, the site itself seems to be pretty functional and smooth compared to other crypto streaming sites out there but I'll need to read the white paper and find out more.
The fact it has backing from the major companies in crypto though is cause for excitement. The main site in 2018 that was making headlines (Choon) simply ran out of money in the end so if the funding continues, there's no reason why this can't grow.
Great info - I would recommend using audius to upload sound files - I use it and got an airdrop of 3000 audio tokens so its a great place for everything audio.
Interesting, do you happen to know if it's allowed with other things than music? Things like podcasts, etc?
Yeah I have uploaded ambient stuff - nature sounds for example. Not sure about spoken word but I don't see why not.
It's the age old question of whether putting a music platform on the blockchain is actually more beneficial than just within a centralised database.
From a music listener's point of view, nobody in the mainstream is going to switch from Spotify because it doesn't have all the artists.
If you're a new artist looking for free exposure however, then this is the sort of niche platform that will work for you.
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I have just joined the airdrop
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What airdrop?
https://insidebitcoins.com/news/8-million-in-tokens-airdropped-to-artists-and-users-of-audius <- Think that guys are talking about this. But I did not have a deeper look into it.
Bad time to drain almost all my crypto! (daily problems easily solved by hive)
This looks like a solid project and well financed
My incoming portfolio would have some of this tokens!
Great post
I come from both worlds - music and investment. Time being the biggest investment one can make. When I post a soundcloud link here on Hive, it may earn a bit, and might have a few listeners, probably much less than soundcloud itself. When Dsound was still active, we had a place to gather and support each other on common ground. It was sad they lost funding, and since then, we (all of us musicians) have been looking for a platform to expose ourselves. Choon came and went unfortunately and Musiccoin faded into the dust as well. There was this from cxcmusic here on chain (Hive), but it still hasn't gotten any attention. The fact that Binance and other proven 'powerhouses' with great track records are investing in this, makes it somewhat of a no brainer and gives high hopes for an audience.
You basically hit the nail on the head with this mate - ok fine, maybe I'll just bite the bullet and get an account set up when my music PC is back haha