Audius (AUDIO) Review

The recording industry has always been synonymous with technological advancement. From records to cassette tapes, to CDs, and all the way to online music streaming, the recording industry has consistently pushed the adoption of new technology forward. In this article we will discuss the Audius project and its corresponding AUDIO token.

What is Audius?

Audius is a three-layered cryptocurrency project, which aims to compete with traditional centralized music streaming. Since internet streaming giant services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Soundcloud emerged, they have grown to become a sort of middleman that separates the artists who record music, from the fans who listen to it. The goal of the Audius project is to remove the “middleman” from the equation. Instead, Audius aims to give the artists themselves complete control of their content, while simultaneously granting them the freedom to distribute their creations to their listeners in a peer-to-peer fashion.

The Founders

Audius was founded by two ivy league computer scientists, Roneil Rumburg and Forrest Browning. The duo originally found great success through mining Bitcoin and eventually sold their spoils during the Bitcoin bull market of 2013. Rumburg and Browning were also early investors in Lightning labs – the project responsible for the Bitcoin Lightning network – as well as several other advantageous cryptocurrency projects.

Both Rumburg and Browning were big fans of electronic music, particularly created by artists they found on Soundcloud. In 2014, Soundcloud signed a licensing deal with Warner Music Group. Subsequently, much of the music created by the duo’s favorite artists was removed from Soundcloud, along with music created by countless other artists. Soundcloud’s barrier of entry for artists became much higher as a result of their partnership with Warner Music Group. This inspired Rumburg and Browning to create a music streaming platform which would allow up and coming artists the ability to publish their music on a fair playing field.

How Musicians Make Money

In the current climate of the music industry, successful artists make the majority of their money through touring and selling merchandise. The royalty payments artists receive from record sales and streaming is – unfortunately – only pennies on the dollar for every song or album that is sold. The majority of the revenue generated through record sales and music streaming services often finds its way into the hands of the middleman producers. Only a small fraction of this income makes it into the hands of the artists.

Both Rumburg and Browning came to the conclusion that crypto technology could offer a viable solution to this problem, however their ideas were slightly ahead of their time. When the duo realized this concept, Ethereum smart contracts were yet to be developed. Nor was there any existing storage solution which could handle the magnitude of this type of project. Although it took several years, cryptocurrency technology had finally caught up to their ideas in 2017.

The Creation of Audius

Both Rumburg and Browning started creating the Audius platform in 2018. The duo managed to raise $5.5 million from venture capitalists. This fast-tracked the project to completion in 2019. By 2020, the Audius token AUDIO began trading on the big-name cryptocurrency platforms and exchanges.

The Three Layers of Audius

As we mentioned earlier in this article, Audius consists of three layers: The App layer represents the Audius website, as well as the mobile Audius apps for Android and Apple smartphones. The second layer of the Audius protocol consists of the node network – which is similar to the Polygon network – that acts as a layer-two scaling solution. This layer is responsible for the speed and ease of use of the network, while remaining compatible with the Ethereum blockchain. Although this was not initially the case, Audius has partnered with Solana as an outsource for managing its layer-two scaling solutions. The third layer is – of course – the Audius blockchain layer, which is responsible for all the actions of the Audius token AUDIO and the baseline functionality behind the project.

Audius and TikTok

On August 17th 2021, Audius and the video streaming service TikTok announced a major partnership. Because of this partnership, artists on Audius now have the ability to integrate their content with the media created on the popular TikTok video sharing app. This partnership surged the market cap of the AUDIO token past the $1 billion dollar mark.

Conclusion

The AUDIO token has shown incredible price action in the recent months. This is majorly due to the fact that the backing Audius project has taken such a creative approach towards cryptocurrency adoption. As we mentioned in the beginning of this article, the recording industry has consistently fueled the advancement of new technologies. AUDIO is performing so well that it may very well find a place on the Killer Whale suggested coin list!

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