Meet The Crypto Spotify
What do you get when you combine the streaming power of Spotify, The decentralization of Bitcoin, and the freeness of Soundcloud? Answer?
Audius.
Meet Audius, a platform that lets you own NOT JUST YOUR MUSIC, but also YOUR LABEL.
About a year ago from the time of writing, Audius was launched to the public for the first time. But why? Well, to answer this question, I have to narrate the major problem in the music industry.
THE OLD PROBLEM WITH MUSIC
Many critics of the industry say that artists are not compensated properly for the awesomeness of their music. In fact, performers usually “lose out” and their only medium of earning “at least a minimum wage equivalent” is via the gig economy. This means that they need to tour to fans, or create concert events where they can charge a fee for entrance, and sell their merchandise along with fan signing shirts, books, posters, and other student-related things that fans want a signature on. Some politicians agree that songwriters are often overlooked and not credited enough with “creator support”, especially during the pandemic.
The pandemic has since stopped all these concerts, hence, the artists are slowly leaving the music industry, in pursuit of other more practical jobs, such as flipping burgers.
Meanwhile, the labels which own the copyrights of these artists (i.e. Sony Music, Universal Music Publishing Group, BMG, Warner Music, etc) has just earned $21.6 Billion (21,600,000,000.00) from streams on Spotify.(https://www.ifpi.org/ifpi-issues-annual-global-music-report-2021/)
HOW AUDIUS HELPS ARTISTS?
This is where Audius comes in.
Audius is a bitcoin-based music streaming service that lets artists have more power over how their music is monetized and enable them to connect directly with fans.
In Audius, the artist (you) own your music, and all the earnings from it. And, on top of that, Audius is not run by a single leader. Instead, Audius is owned and run by a community of artists, fans, and developers.
It achieved a total of 5.3 million users in July 2021, gaining a huge spike of user growth from the previous 2.9 million users in early January.
DO I HAVE TO PAY?
No. Not the users, not the uploaders (artists). In fact, the main phrase you see read or hear in all Audius citations online is that it is:
free forever.
HOW ARTISTS EARN
I don’t like to drag this article too long, so here is how artists earn: uploading, airdrops, streaming, and staking.
All of these are tied to the single most important feature of Audius, and that is the Audius token, called $AUDIO (yes the dollar sign is part of the name).
The $AUDIO token is airdropped to the 10,000 most active users. Active users can simply claim free tokens from the Audius dashboard. The $AUDIO token can be earned from streams, in the same way an artist earns from Spotify (minus the fees that goes to the label, since remember, in Audius YOU the label). And, if you love investing in cryptocurrency tokens like the $AUDIO token, note that last year the price per $AUDIO token was $0.15, and today each token is already $2.59, right after Tiktok announced its partnership with Audius.
Step-by-Step Guide:
1. Visit your Audius dashboard.
2. If you’re eligible for the reward you will see a “Claim AUDIO” button.
Now click on the “Claim AUDIO” button to claim your tokens. You don’t need any ETHEREUM to claim your tokens
(tech notes: because Audius doesn’t run on Ethereum, instead it runs on Solana)
3. The claimed tokens will immediately be available in your dashboard.
The current average distribution per account was 2,000 AUDIO tokens.
Your rewards may vary.
4. For the staking and investing steps, I will write a follow-up article to this to keep it separate (for those who wish to get in depth with the crypto experience; it includes wallet creation, and an introduction video about tokens in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIgkP0H5q3A)
