Audius

Audius is a decentralized music streaming and sharing platform seeking to become a real competitor of current market leaders like Spotify, Soundcloud, and Pandora. The main goal of Audius is to promote a fairer distribution of the revenue that artists get in the industry, which is nowadays around 12%, on average. To put this in perspective, professional players in sports leagues like the NFL or the NBA get an average of 48% of the earnings they generate, which means the music industry is currently rewarding its creators about 4 times less than similar industries by size. Audius wants to change that by eliminating intermediaries with its decentralized streaming platform.

The project doesn’t just want to optimize the earnings of the artists, it also aims to allow more direct and transparent interaction between creators and fans. This can be achieved by enabling a democratic system that gives universal access to the platform, distributing governance rights corresponding to the value created, and keeping records of prices and earnings of all participants. To do so, Audius has its own native token ($AUDIO) that serves three main purposes: security, special feature access, and governance. 

In April 2021, the platform announced that it would allow artists to showcase their NFT collection in their own galleries so that fans can purchase them. With all the increasing attention that NFTs have been getting lately, Audius has seen the opportunity to bring non-crypto fans looking for collectibles into their own crypto-based platform. It is worth noting that Audius has no plans of becoming a bidding platform or an NFT marketplace but rather wants to increase fan engagement by aggregating collectibles listed on OpenSea, Rarible, or Super Rare, among others. Users interested in collections of their favorite artists will need to stake 100 AUDIO tokens to gain access.