In an era of endless copyright flags, oceans of repost chains and deficit of royalty payouts, it’s easy to lose sight of the magic that brought artists and fans together on the internet. Audius has emerged as a glimmering beacon of hope to empower online music streaming communities through a means that has never existed before.
The adolescent platform/protocol made astonishing waves during their public launch four months ago featuring renown artists including the likes of Mr. Carmack, Rezz, Lido, Zeds Dead, and Graves. Audius has continued to cultivate a dedicated user base through community-driven beat cyphers with innovative judges such as Noer the Boy and Jon Casey as well as other informational live streams.
Audius is one of the most exciting things I’ve heard about in a while. This might really affect the community and life around underground music in a major way. – Lido
They’ve also won the hearts of groups like Brownies & Lemonade, Phuture Collective, Below The Surface and Good Society (who they’re throwing a party with in a week). Amidst their mobile app launch, Audius co-founder Forrest Browning took the time to answer some of our curiosities surrounding the project which we are delighted to share below!
Why does Audius need to exist?
Audius is a decentralized SoundCloud alternative. We see this as a more artist-friendly and artist-empowering platform than what currently exists on user generated content (UGC) sites. We let an artist communicate and connect directly to their fans without a platform in the middle. The guarantee we make to an artist is that, “look, your content can’t be censored or taken down by our company, and we can’t de-platform you”. In fact, we don’t even control the content. Our stance is that it should not be possible for a company to control who does and does not have a voice – moderation should exist, but be transparent and community-driven.
When you come to Audius as an artist and upload your music, you’re not actually uploading it to us. You’re uploading it to a variety of decentralized computers, almost like nodes in a network behind the scenes. For an end user like an artist or a fan, we don’t show you that at all so you don’t get confused. So behind the scenes is all the crazy blockchain technology, but to the end user it looks and feels like a normal music streaming service.
There have been a handful of music streaming platforms that come & go over the years. What make Audius different?
What’s pretty wild about Audius is that we actually aren’t the ones doing the hosting of the content. A lot of these more niche music streaming services will spin up and have a few people use them, but eventually they run out of money or something like that and they shut down and all of your music goes with them. I mean hell, even MySpace ran into this issue when they migrated their data and they lost most of the music content a few years ago. With Audius, things are stored in a decentralized fashion. First of all, all the metadata is stored on the blockchain so things won’t ever magically disappear. Secondly, because we’re not hosting the music it also won’t just disappear. So even if (hypothetically) Audius were to wind down as a company or go out of business, the music and the product will live on, so your music basically can be indefinitely backed up on this decentralized network without you having to worry about us as a company.
Our whole philosophy has been make it simple: make it just as easy to use as any normal streaming site and it’s up to us as the engineers and as the creators to hide all that complexity… You would have no idea that all this stuff is going on behind the scenes.
I love the under-the-hood approach.
All the blockchain interactions are happening behind the scenes in your browser. From our perspective, the blockchain is a very cool piece of tech but we don’t think people are gonna use this just because it’s decentralized or just because it’s on the blockchain. Our whole philosophy has been make it simple: make it just as easy to use as any normal streaming site and it’s up to us as the engineers and as the creators to hide all that complexity. So you sign up using Twitter or using an email and a password – it’s dead simple. You would have no idea that all this stuff is going on behind the scenes; like for example when you upload a song you have no idea that it’s technically not being put on our servers, it’s being put on this decentralized network.
How will artists be able to monetize their work in the future? Will this model also work for traditional record labels and music distributors?
To your first question, later in the year we hope to be rolling out monetization. It will sort of a freemium model, and entirely opt-in for artists. So either a couple bucks all you can stream, or you can choose to listen to an ad every few songs. In either case, around 90% of the money that’s generated from the streams goes straight to the artist and about 10% is micropayments paid out to people running the nodes. That’ll be later in the year, and that won’t be for everything. For example, if an artists wants, they can flag certain content as premium which requires this freemium model, while allowing the majority of their catalog to be entirely free. So you can have the free fanbase and also help monetize some of your super-fans if you will.
Will Audius take a cut of that streaming revenue?
We don’t. Around 90% will go straight to the artists, and about 10% goes to the people running the hosting nodes.
Do you foresee this model working for contracts with record deals and traditional music distributors?
I think so, yeah. We’ve only been out for four months or so, and we were frankly kind of blown away by the traffic that we had. In just the first couple weeks, we had thousands of artists sign up, and we had hundreds of thousands of users come to listen. It was wild… The product itself is only four months old. As the product matures and we add more & more features, we’ll add in more complexity and help support more cases like splits and things like that. So as an artist you can upload your content but cut in your label, distributor, or whoever the respective rights holders are. We can also see a future where we have some sort of UI where as a label they can help upload the content to their artist accounts if those artists opt-in, basically a sort of enterprise account management.
How does Audius avoid copyright issues with your current takedown policy?
Obviously right off the bat: we don’t condone copyright violation of any kind. The terms of service clearly state that sort of behavior isn’t allowed, and it’s a violation of our terms of service. If a rights holder has an issue with a specific piece of content, they are welcome to file a claim against the people running the node hosting that content or the people doing the uploading, but Audius is totally out of the loop.
Currently are other people running nodes or are you guys hosting them right now?
We have over a dozen nodes all across the world being run by members of the community which is super cool to see.
Our incentives are extremely aligned with the artist. We are incentivized to design and build a network and a product to help the artist and help the fans.
What other advantages of using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology are there for a music streaming platform?
Our incentives are extremely aligned with the artist. We are incentivized to design and build a network and a product to help the artist and their fans. We cannot change the rules out from under artists, and are community owned and operated. P2P tech lets our community self-organize to provide the end user experience. Because it’s decentralized behind the scenes, we aren’t required to take a cut of that revenue to cover our hosting costs or anything like that. We’re able to let 90% of the money go straight to the artist, and we’re able to let 10% go to the hosting fees of people running nodes. And finally, we’re able to expose a lot more metrics and data to the artists about their fans. Because it’s all on the blockchain, you as an artist are able to see all the analytics after you upload your tracks – see who’s listening to your tracks and what they like. We’re in the process of building out even more analytics tools like where are your super-fans located? Where did your new single get listened to the most? Maybe you’d use that to plan a tour. Things like that. Things that you’d normally have to pay for on SoundCloud, or you don’t get at all with Spotify; we’re going to make that totally free and available to everyone with Audius. We’re going to be adding maps, graphs, charts, and other tools to help you interact with your fans in the best way possible.
What are some other features on your roadmap?
Stay tuned for a bunch of cool stuff. For us, it’s all about building things that help artists interact directly with their fans. I will say in the coming months we’ll be working on a lot of social features, and will also be rolling out an embeddable player pretty soon. Those are kind of the two big things we’re working on: An embeddable player so that music blogs can cover your tracks and a lot of social features – things like direct messaging and other ways to get feedback on your tracks.
Tell us a little bit about the mobile app. What excites you the most about it?
We’re really excited to be a fully fledged music streaming service with the mobile app out. By that I mean, previously we’ve had a desktop app and a website app, but if you want to listen on the go or if you want to listen when you’re not in front of a computer it hasn’t been possible. With this, it really allows 360 degree coverage, and makes us a serious contender when it comes to being a music streaming platform. Because in this day and age in 2020 you can’t really be a music streaming service unless you support mobile. So we’re extremely excited to have mobile for iOS out this week and Android in a couple weeks.
It’s easy to forget how many hundreds of thousands of aspiring artists are trying to build a fanbase and trying to break out. It’s awesome to have that many people pursuing their dreams and grinding it out, and to be building a platform for those guys instead of just the 1/10th of 1% that have already made it.
What do you wish someone had told you before you founded Audius?
That’s a great question. I would really say, both my cofounder (Roneil Rumburg) and myself have been blown away by just how thick the long tail of content creators are; by how many underground and independent music producers are actually out there. I think if you’re somebody that just uses Spotify or Apple Music day in and day out, it’s easy to forget how many hundreds of thousands of aspiring artists are trying to build a fanbase and trying to break out. It’s awesome to have that many people pursuing their dreams and grinding it out, and to be building a platform for those guys instead of just the 1/10th of 1% that have already made it.
At its core, Audius is an open-source, unstoppable P2P protocol that bears a wide array of use cases from storing and streaming music files to generously paying out artists and record labels. They’re supporting “the little guy” in ways that were previously impossible (such as music “curators” earning a share of revenue, as specified in their whitepaper), building an enthusiastic community, and genuinely listening to their users. The front-end application that we interact with today leverages bleeding-edge decentralized technology, and anyone has the ability to build their own application on top of the stack.
We’re building our own first party client… that’s kind of our take on it. But because everything is open source, we foresee multiple other people using the code, the back-end if you will, to write their own front-end; to wrap the back-end with their own UI. While what we’ve built looks like Spotify or SoundCloud, we could foresee a world where somebody takes the music backend and creates a website that looks like Pandora or something like that.
Folks tend to think in the confines of what we’re used to experiencing in the context of music streaming platforms. Audius is flipping the script – breaking the mold – pushing the envelope. They’ve earned their seat at the table and have a remarkable shot at reworking the threads of a broken music industry.
Download their brand new mobile app here and experience the revolution!
