Opus is a decentralized music-sharing platform that tackles the issue of music ownership and sharing at an infrastructure and protocol level. Leveraging the speed and redundancy of a novel Interplanetary FileSystem, IPFS, Opus can scale and deliver thousands of tracks per second in a fully decentralized manner.
This throughput is achieved by encrypting music tracks on the fly and storing the encrypted music files permanently on the IPFS swarm. Only the decryption keys, and file hashes, are saved immutably on the Opus smart contract. By only storing the decryption keys and reference hashes, we can facilitate a number of novel features such as file ownership, trade, and full decentralization. With Opus, artists can monetize their content by selling permanent access to their IPFS music files and decryption keys directly to a fan’s Ethereum contract, without any middleman. With additional application layers, Opus music players introduce a novel way for users to maintain ownership of music tracks they played across different players and different continents.
As everything is transparently stored in the Opus smart contract, we will also facilitate additional governance mechanisms such as a Opus DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) treasury funded from a small percentage of each sale, and an artist bounty system that allows artists to pay a small amount for people to share their tracks. The possibilities are endless
The music industry is a rapidly growing industry. In fact, the music industry generated $42.9Bn in revenue in 2016. At the same time, we have observed a decrease in artist's revenue. Something is wrong.
Fees. Streaming platforms such as Spotify, Deezer , and Apple Music take up to 80% of artist’s revenue, and while larger artists can accept it, small artists are often unable to make a living from music streaming
Fragmentation. With streaming services competing for exclusive deals and fragmenting the music industry, fans often have to struggle between numerous different platforms just to listen to their favorite artists
Playlist makers are also not compensated at all for the hard work they put into creating well-crafted playlists that, experts say, drives most of the growth in the online streaming industry.
Censorship and legislation that restricts a global audience. In fact Spotify and apple are not available in over 120 countries due to mass bureaucracy.
We do not deny that in an ideal world a central server could potentially overcome challenges such as not taking exorbitant commissions from artists. In fact, this would be an easy route. However it's impossible in practice because of greed and shareholder pressure. If only there was a way to ensure prices are permanent from inception that is efficient and yet user friendly...
Opus runs on a novel 4 layer stack that ensures fully decentralization and anti-censorship with minimum latency.
▶ Application layer. This is the top layer where the Opus API interacts with various 3rd party players to decode and deliver music tracks.
▶ Logic layer. This layer, is a system of smart contracts running on the Ethereum blockchain. On this layer, resides the user contract which stores each user’s decryption keys, reference file hashes to the IPFS storage, and the business logic that handles transactions.
▶ Directory layer. While each track has it's permanent IPFS hash, the directory layer is a JSON database that stores all the Hashes of tracks available on the Opus network.
▶ Storage layer. Due to gas constraints, we store all the tracks on the IPFS network. This ensures that songs are available permanently, decentrally and with low latency.
What makes OPT have value?
▶ The supply of tokens. The OPT supply is inherently deflationary with a burning treasury fund. This means that as time passes, each individual OPT token will become more and more valuable.
▶ The underlying music sold on the platform. Opus token are effectively linked by the value of the songs sold on the Opus platform. The more songs that are sold, the greater the value of the network and with a deflationary supply, will mean increased OPT valuations.
▶ The ability to vote on the OpusDAO. Important marketing and development decisions are made by the Opus DAO which is voted on every month. Each vote is weighted by the number of OPT the voter holds, having more OPT will enable you to have a greater say on the direction of the Opus project.
For more info, visit their website: opus-foundation.org