As a musician, and a bit of a geek, I've been keeping an eye on new platforms for delivering my music for a while. As as a bit of a latecomer to crypto, latterly it's been crypto platforms that have been of interest - for reasons I probably don't have to explain to the audience reading this ;-)
Back when I was just starting to learn a bit more about crypto, I came across an app that seemed to have a lovely interface and talked an interesting game about using crypto for various exciting things, but it didn't have a token yet.
I dipped my toe, uploaded some things and, as I just saw it as a new 'music player', lost interest.
Choon came along, we had fun, then the fun stopped. Some other small projects bobbled about, Emanate arrived. But nothing was really happening in the space that I'd feel comfortable pushing my listeners to.
Then yesterday, I got an email from Audius, saying that I had $AUDIO tokens to claim. So I went back and looked.
And my - did I miss a trick by letting these guys drop off my radar!
From a musicians point of view, this could be The One (well, the First One, at least).
- A functioning (and good-looking) platform, with mobile support
- A working payment system in a token that's tradable. Now.
- Anonymous plays seem to work fine (take that, SoundCloud) (and it looks like they count to wards a play payment - double whammy to the SC)
- Listeners/fans can earn from curation
- Some seriously interesting plans (but as I'm a cynical old bugger, still wary of these - but they have delivered a solid foundation)
And they are talking a good game on 'users owning the platform'.
https://twitter.com/AudiusProject/status/1318279890672627713
- AudiusProject
From a small, amateur muso who is interested in crypto, thus is heady stuff.
So, initial excitement our of the way, it does leave some pretty pertinent questions.
How much does the user get paid for using the platform? I'm trying to find that out - all this excitement will be for nothing if the payout is not much better than Sp*tify (but that's not the impression I'm getting at all, obviously).
What is the token worth. Well, according to coinmarketcap:
Not too shabby at all, given they just dumped 4750 on me for doing very little at all! And the price has dropped as I suspect quite a few folk have dumped they tokens. (Something I'm not planning on doing, BTW - if this has legs, I want to be in the game!)
But better heads than mine will suss out the crypto side and tell me why I shouldn't be so bullish about this, I'm sure ;-)
But right now, I'm excited. And I wanted to share. I'll be reading up some more over the weekend, and tidying up my Audius library. I'll post more info (and probably excitement) as I find things out, but would be interested to hear what you think.
Here's some handy links:
Main site/music player --> https://audius.co
Token info/background/white paper: https://audius.org/
Couple of Medium articles to launch off:
https://audiusproject.medium.com/community-meet-audio-cf1e1d052fd6
https://medium.com/audius/welcome-audio-to-mainnet-409009bc130c
Oh, mustn't forget this one...
https://audius.co/gribbles