Go Bitcoin go! While a far cry from some of the big winners this week, Bitcoin has jumped nearly 20% amidst all the crypto regulation and Ethereum upgrade discussions. Pulling into first is Internet Computer with almost 100% gains, Ravencoin with 90% and to no surprise, Axie Infinity continues to break all-time high after all-time high with another 85% bump this week. Hopefully, the market continues this trend to close out an otherwise rough last couple of months. Our report this week covers a new and interesting take on the monetization of music and artists with Audius.
Introduction
The Audius protocol brings artists, node operators, and fans together in an incentive-aligned way, allowing these actors to collectively provide a high-quality audio streaming experience. These experiences are guided by the foundational beliefs that users should be compensated in proportion to how much value they create for the network and that artists should directly engage and transact
with their fans. In this protocol, governance power is earned by creating
value in Audius, and shared consistently between user groups contributing to the protocol. Access is democratized so that anyone can contribute to Audius if they follow the protocol rules, and all information remains publicly accessible. In 2017, the music industry generated $43 billion in revenue but only 12% of that made its way to artists. As points of comparison, NFL players capture at least 47% of the revenue generated by the entire NFL, and NBA players captured between 49 and 51%. Centralized user-generated music distribution platforms have always succumbed to the influence of legacy institutions, struggling to find sustainable business models. The Audius protocol allows artists, fans, and node operators to collectively provide a high-quality end-user music streaming experience without an unfair centralized infrastructure. Audius creates a protocol where the shared success of the platform directly benefits the users responsible for its success.
Audius focuses its attention on five major components to create this welcoming atmosphere for artists and users alike. The Audius token, stablecoins, and artist tokens create a platform token and shared token economy that aligns the incentives of all participants with three primary prongs of functionality: access, security, and governance. Content Nodes allow for a user-operated network of nodes to host content and permission access to content on behalf of artists. The Content Ledger creates a single source of truth for all data accessible within the Audius protocol, anchoring references to content hosted by content nodes. Discovery Nodes offer user-operated indexing of the Audius content ledger and provide an easily querriable interface for retrieving metadata. Lastly, Governance allows for modifications and improvements to Audius, which shares control among those who have created and are creating value on an ongoing basis.
Content nodes maintain the availability of content and metadata in Audius on AudSP, the Audius-native extension to IPFS. These nodes can be run by node operators alongside an active network stake, giving them the opportunity to earn part of the ongoing Audius token issuance and aggregated fee pools, or can be run by an artist themself to host their own content. By default, an artist’s client elects a set of…
Hi! My name is Lark Davis!
I’m a cryptocurrency investor with years of experience and I’ve been making consistent profits in the crypto space.
I’m passionate about helping others do the same, so I run multiple educational channels on crypto investing.
