Audius is a decentralized music sharing and streaming agreement designed to put artists at the center of the industry. The platform not only dramatically increases the ability of artists to express themselves freely, but also connects artists directly with fans, while ensuring that artists receive the majority of their revenue from streaming their work. Audius has no middlemen (Spotify/Apple Music or streaming services like record labels) and the entire experience is designed to deliver Music directly from the artist to the consumer. Launched in 2018, the Audius project even has its own token, called AUDIO, and is currently valued at nearly $1.2 billion. This is a token based on the ERC-20 standard that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. The decentralization of music services means that content is not hosted on a central server, but indexed in countless places via blockchain. Performers who are active on the platform will be rewarded with automatic AUDIO tokens to spend on their hit tracks. Different frequency algorithms even reward performers when they trade with fans through the platform. Audius, a decentralized music provider, has distributed about 50 million AUDIO tokens to 10,000 performers in about three years.

A music sharing platform that gives artists the tools to connect directly with their audience. The use of decentralized technology can ensure artists' rights to their music and provide an anti-censorship platform for the expression and distribution of artistic works. Let everyone freely share, monetize, and listen to audio.

The current business model of the music industry is not friendly to creators, and the current dominant business model is almost entirely driven by record labels and music platforms/apps, with many creators not benefiting the most. Statistics show that music artists receive only about 12 percent of the total revenue from their work, while new artists or niche musicians simply cannot continue to create without adequate support.

In this context, Audius is trying to change that. It's a decentralized Music sharing and streaming agreement that promotes direct transactions between listeners and creators without any middlemen, like Spotify/Apple Music or streaming service providers like record labels, Everyone is free to distribute, commercialize and stream any audio content. Not only does Audius want "the middleman to stop making the difference," but the platform operator's role is clearly limited to music discovery/hosting and to tailor incentives to creators and listeners.

Audius tokens play several key roles in decentralized music streaming services. The AUDIO token helps maintain network security while providing access to proprietary functionality within the platform. In addition, AUDIO tokens can be pledged to protect the platform. AUDIO coins empower fans and musicians by being part of a service where anyone can enjoy, share and profit from music! As an alternative to popular music streaming service SoundCloud, Audius enables musicians to easily interact with fans in innovative ways through unique experiences and participation rewards. In addition, by pledging AUDIO, users receive a portion of their network fees, as well as additional voting rights and proprietary features in the governance system, as a reward for protecting the network. In addition, by pledging AUDIO tokens, providers can gain additional fan discovery opportunities, features, and services.

By mortgaging tokens, running discovery nodes or content nodes, users can earn higher fan discovery possibilities and a portion of network fees; By locking up tokens, unlock more exclusive features and services, such as artist tokens and badges, and gain voting rights for fans who want to share in their success; Participate in the protocol governance vote to contribute to future iterations of the protocol.

Audius networks are built on IPFS, a distributed storage solution. IPFS supports modular object-level encryption, global distribution capabilities, secure content addressing, and object immutability. To encourage high availability of files stored through the Audius protocol, AudSP will provide users with an incentive structure for hosting web content. File references and associated metadata stored in the Audius blockchain will be IPLD links. Platform operators are effectively constrained to find/host music and tailor incentives to creators and listeners. In this frictionless experience model, music content creators can share their work openly and directly with the audience, while setting incentive conditions as they wish. The Audius infrastructure is designed around Audius and Loud tokens, which music service providers can use as collateral to manipulate the protocol and recommend music content to listeners by indexing the Audius blockchain and facilitating music discovery. Audius tokens can also be used to arbitrate music content claims, file content claims, vote on governance proposals, and more. Music service providers can receive a certain percentage of the revenue from the audience proposed by this way to reduce the token supply inflation of Audius tokens. The idea is to limit the role of music service providers to exclusively serving as channels of discovery (to reduce their impact) and align their incentives with those of music creators. Listeners can pay for music content with Loud tokens, which support 1:1 anchoring with several stabecoins on the market. Creators get 90% of the revenue from streaming music, and they can customize pricing models to support better streaming, access to artist memberships, individual track purchases, album collectibles, and more. Audius established a direct payment channel between listeners and music creators to help artists create early. In addition, Audius's listener interface will not even feel like it is built with "blockchain" technology, meaning that no technical background is required to listen to music on the platform, just like listening to music on other Web-based streaming services.

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