Audius is a decentralized, community-owned and artist-controlled music-sharing protocol. Audius provides an Ethereum-based alternative to existing streaming platforms to help artists publish and monetize their work and distribute it directly to fans.
The mission of the project is to give everyone the freedom to share, monetize, and listen to any audio.
- An efficient token economy powered by the Audius platform token ($AUDIO), 3rd-party stablecoins, and artist tokens
- A decentralized storage solution and ledger for sharing audio and metadata
- A unique track encryption scheme paired with a programmable mechanism to unlock user-specific proxy re-encryption keys for content
- A discovery protocol for users to efficiently query metadata
- A decentralized governance protocol, whereby artists, node operators, and fans are individually and collectively enfranchised in decision making about protocol changes and upgrades
Audius consists of three demographics of users: Artists (content creators), Fans (content consumers), and Service Providers. Some users check fall into all three demographics!
- Artists upload tracks, create albums, and share content to their following
- Fans stream tracks, create playlists, subscribe to & follow artists, and re-share content to their following
- Service Providers serve app traffic, stream songs, and help secure the network
Service providers can provide one or more of the following services by staking $AUDIO tokens and registering their service:
- Discovery node (host an endpoint with SSL support and register endpoint with stake)
- Content node (host an endpoint with SSL support and register endpoint with stake)
In the following diagram, creators can either run a content node themselves or use one of the network-registered content nodes.
Audius was founded by Roneil Rumburg, Forrest Browning and Ranidu Lankage in 2018.
Roneil most recently co-founded Kleiner Perkins' early-stage seed fund. At KP, he was responsible for seed investments into Blockchain and AI companies, including Lightning Labs. Roneil attended Stanford University and previously co-founded a Bitcoin peer to peer payment company called Backslash.
Forrest is a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, and most recently was a Co-Founder of StacksWare, an enterprise datacenter management platform started from a Stanford University research project. The company provides analytics at scale for Fortune 500 customers, and was successfully acquired in late 2017.
Ranidu created vision/mission for the company and launched the company's external brand presence on major publications along with content programs to elevate the company’s profile in the blockchain and music space. He left Audius in 2019.
