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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.
It's not supposed to. It's just techno-babble designed to fool investors and giving them money
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?
... 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.
Its "Napster" but with Blockchain. I think.
If it ever gains any traction the 'establishment' music undustry will make certain it shares the same fate as Napster did.
The music industry has deep pockets and can easily afford to just keep filing lawsuit after lawsuit until they drain every last cent Audius has and force them into bankruptcy. Controlling the channels of distribution and functioning as gatekeepers between artists and their audiences is the music industry's bread & butter. They will go nuclear on anything and anyone who threatens their monopolistic control.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.