Slashdot Mirror
Audius Raises $5.5 Million To Decentralize Music, Help Artists Get Paid Faster (techcrunch.com)
A new company called Audius, lead by entrepreneur and DJ Ranidu Lankage, has raised $5.5 million to build a blockchain-based alternative to Spotify or SoundCloud. "Users will pay for Audius tokens or earn them by listening to ads," reports TechCrunch. "Their wallet will then pay out a fraction of a cent per song to stream from decentralized storage across the network, with artists receiving roughly 85 percent -- compared to roughly 70 percent on the leading streaming apps. The rest goes to compensating whomever is hosting that song, as well as developers of listening software clients, one of which will be built by Audius." From the report: Audius plans to launch its open-sourced product in beta later this year. But it's already found some powerful investors that see SoundCloud as vulnerable to the cryptocurrency revolution. Audius has raised a $5.5 million Series A led by General Catalyst and Lightspeed, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Pantera Capital, 122West and Ascolta Ventures. They're betting that Audius' token will grow in value, making the stockpile it keeps worth a fortune. It could then sell chunks of its tokens to earn revenue instead of charging artists directly. The big question will be whether Audius can use the token economy to crack the chicken-and-egg problem of getting its first creators and listeners on a platform that might be less functionally robust than its traditional competitors. There are a lot of moving parts to decentralize, but there are also plenty of disgruntled musicians out there waiting for something better.
Or just use the lightning network and collect Satoshis directly with no fees.
Seriously, we donâ(TM)t need more rent seeking middlemen.
LN is the micropayment system weâ(TM)ve been waiting decades for.
..don't panic
No, it doesn't make any sense.
I don't respond to AC's.
So you can't mine the coins/tokens, you pay cash or listen to ads to fill your wallet, and listening to a song automatically withdraws some money to send it to the song artist's wallet. Unless they give some specifics for how many songs a single token provides, how many tokens are earned from watching a single advertisement, and how much a token costs if you pay directly, I can't quite see the difference to how it's being done right now from the listener perspective, aside from maybe a serious lack of content in the beginning.
This would work perfectly and be awesome since microtransactions and 10 minute or less clearing of payments with zero fraud is what crypto does BUT people investing in these coins and an upward trend and miners of it wanting to make money will screw with it far too hard. They'd have to standardize the price. For example, there is a coin where 1 unit of it = $1 USD and always will. But they can implement that. The code exists. If they do, it'd be perfect. Otherwise your music would cost $1 one day and $5 the next because of an investor pump and dump scheme.
Spotify knows how many ads I've ever seen, Spotify know what ads I've seen and what their payment rates are per view. If they didn't they wouldn't be able to sell ads at all. Spotify also knows how much money I've ever given them in subscription payments, if they didn't, they couldn't track who was subscribed. This means that Spotify knows how much money I brought in every month to their company.
Spotify knows what songs I've listened to, they keep track of how many people listen to each song. If they didn't, they wouldn't be able to do analytics given me recommended songs, they wouldn't have top 100 lists, or be able to report how many monthly listeners an artist has and how much they will pay those artists per listen. What is the problem that the blockchain is solving which wasn't solved with database queries?
Is there a way to bet against what these venture companies are betting for? I'd like to try to make a fortune doing that, and I think it's a better bet.
Instead of " . . . but on a computer" or " . . . but over the internet", we now have " . . . but with a blockchain"
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
... pay out a fraction of a cent per song... with artists receiving roughly 85 percent - compared to roughly 70 percent on the leading streaming apps.
What is 85% of fraction of a cent? Is it larger than 70%? Without any actual numbers the artist cut means absolutely nothing.
...less middlemen...continuing disintermediation of the music industry...
nothing to see here - move along
but with blockchain! Consumers loooove needing to buy chunks of some fake currency and doing arithmetic to figure out just how much that thing they want to buy actually costs.
I bet Audius.com and Audius.de the security company are really happy they picked THEIR name. I am sure it will drive a lot of web traffic to them. Guess they didn't do a search on their name before they picked it.
it's the new bubble that blockchain is a bubble!
We absolutely do not need this. But some investor somewhere will say, "Ooh.. Blockchain!"
It's the Brawndo of the tech world.
Except that Musicoin doesn't seem to to take on, and that Audius will profit to other people, of course.
When major record labels sued Napster ( A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (2001)), they had clear grounds to do so: Napster was infringing the copyright in the plaintiffs' recordings. Assuming Audius is obtaining permission from the owner of copyright in each recording and underlying musical work performed through its service, what grounds would the incumbent labels have to sue Audius and not have the suit discharged with prejudice as frivolous in summary judgment?
When the World Wide Web was released to the public, it caused a bubble that burst in 2001. "Pets.com: Because pets can't drive."
That was ages ago and the tech stock market has already greatly surpassed that all time high. It was a bubble but the idea that tech and Internet is so valuable was correct. Now look at crypto's bubble that has already burst. It seems like the history will repeat itself. This is the third Bitcoin bubble that has burst. Bubbles come and go repeatedly. It's just price speculation - the underlying tech is unaffected.