On 30th October 2020, Audius announced they will be migrating to the Solana blockchain. Audius is a music streaming protocol that will allow artists to get directly paid from their fans and is completely a decentralised protocol.
From reaching 800k monthly active users (a 30% increase month-over-month) to a 33% increase in tracks with more than 30,000 uploads in four days, this has been an explosive period of growth for the platform.
Audius Blog – Solana Migration Announcement
What Problem is Audius Trying to Solve?
The music industry generates $43 billion in revenue but only 12% goes to content artists, according to the Audius Whitepaper. The Audius platform hopes to fix this poor music creator pay out ratio by using blockchain to level the playing field.
The challenges that Audius hope to eliminate:
- There is little to no transparency around the origins of artist payouts (e.g. number of plays, location, original gross payment before fees)
- Incomplete rights ownership data often prevents content artists from getting paid; instead, earnings accumulate in digital service providers (DSPs) and rights societies
- There are layers of middlemen and significant time delay involved in payments to artists
- Publishing rights are complicated and opaque, with no incentives for the industry to make rights data public and accurate
- Remixes, covers, and other derivative content are largely censored due to rights management issues
- Licensing issues prevent DSPs and content from being accessible worldwide
Mission of Audius
Audius is building a protocol that hopes to revolutionise the music industry by rewarding listeners & value creating users, and provide a social space that has no intermediaries hindering access, transparency or artist to fan value flows.
Security – Own Your Content
With Audius, artists can generate immutable and timestamped records for their creative works, secured by an incentive-aligned decentralized network of node operators. This helps music creators actually get paid for the hard work, where the Audius platform (protocol) takes care of them getting paid correctly.
Features – An Open Network
Unlock premium features for curated engagement by using our native platform token, $AUDIO. From gated content to artist tokens and remix contests, Audius is here to give fans the exclusivity they deserve. Read more on $AUDIO at audius.org
Governance – Empowering All Participants
As a platform owned and operated by its users, the future of Audius is entirely driven by $AUDIO governance. Everything about Audius is governable, with voting weight directly correlated to $AUDIO staked for value-added services.
Audius Protocol Live Stats
You can check out how the Audius protocol usage, unique users, song plays, over at the Audius Dashboard.
Learn More on How Blockchain is Revolutionising Music with Grammy Winner Music RAC
Why Did Audius Migrate to Solana?
Due to bottlenecks on Ethereum, blockchain Audius users were experience heavy load issues, search, indexing and streaming delays in playing their 150k music catalog. They stated on their migration blog post the reasons why:
- Cheap: Offering around 1M transactions for $10.
- Fast: Block times are 400ms, with confirmations often under 1 second.
- Live: Mainnet has been live for nearly 8 months and processed nearly 5B transactions.
- Decentralized: With over 180 nodes on mainnet, and over 500 on testnet.
Over the next 7 months be prepared for Audius ‘breaking‘ Solana with nearly 1M monthly active users:
- Phase One — Audius listen tracking to be migrated by the end of 2020.
- Phase Two — Audius content ledger rewrite and auditing to be tested in Q1 2021.
- Phase Three — Full migration expected in Q2 2021.
Are you Building A Project that Needs to Scale? Check out Solana’s Grant Program, where your project can get access to funding, technical support, recruiting, marketing & design.
