Audius is a decentralized music streaming platform. By 2022, it will have 6 million exclusive users and more than 100,000 artists. Listeners directly support artists through the native encrypted currency AUDIO. Audius aims to remove middleman and label barriers, giving artists exclusive ownership of their music and 90% of token revenue.
AUDIO tokens will be issued on October 22, 2020, with an issue price of $0.02 and a total planned issuance of 1.182 billion. At present, all tokens are unlocked, 1.106 billion are used for circulation, the unit price of tokens is about 0.15 US dollars, the total market value is about 175 million US dollars, and the FDV is about 187 million US dollars. Currently, there are 38,476 on-chain addresses holding tokens, and the proportion of TOP100 holding tokens is 94.78%, which is relatively concentrated.
The core features of Audius are as follows. Persistence, unlike centralized platforms that frequently modify rules for creators, Audius' rules are deterministic. The copyright belongs to the artist, and the artist can realize the ownership of the copyright of his work by earning AUDIO, and can vote on the change of the Audius agreement. Information transparency, all payment information of users using AUDIO is open and transparent to the whole network.
Audius was co-founded by Forrest Browning and Roneil Rumburg in 2018, and is currently gradually migrating to the Solana chain. Audius' thinking on music monetization, ownership, and creator economy is worth studying.