A brief history
Audius was co-founded in 2018 by Forrest Browning and Roneil Rumburg. Audius is a blockchain-based decentralized music streaming platform to give artists and curators more control over their music creations. On Audius, artists can upload, secure, and distribute their songs through the platform’s decentralized nodes. Through this process, artists retain full ownership over their music and can decide how to monetize on the platform, which can range from distributing music free of charge or setting fees to unlock exclusive content. Unlike other music streaming services, Audius does not take a cut from artists’ revenue. Music curators can receive 90% of the revenue in AUDIO, and the remaining 10% will be given to stakers that support the Audius network.
AUDIO in practice
AUDIO is an ERC-20 token that also serves as the governance token on Audius with an initial total supply of 1 billion and no maximum supply. Holders can stake their AUDIO to help secure the network, participate in the governance of Audius, and access exclusive content. Additionally, anyone can become a node operator by holding and staking AUDIO tokens. The larger their AUDIO stake, the higher the chance their nodes are used by fans to discover music content. There are two types of nodes on Audius: content nodes and discovery nodes. Content nodes host, secure, and manage content on behalf of the artists and discovery nodes index the metadata and music uploaded to the Audius content ledger to allow fans to quickly search for artists or songs. By helping to run the protocol operations, both types of a node can earn AUDIO from the ongoing token issuance and aggregated fee pools. There are also several ways for artists to earn AUDIO from their content. They can get AUDIO by making it to the Top 5 Weekly Trending Track, Top 5 Weekly Trending Playlist, Top 10 Monthly API App, and first track upload after verifying their social media accounts. In the future Audius plans to airdrop AUDIO tokens to artists based on their level of social engagement with fans and their number of listens.
