There are hundreds of projects in the world of cryptocurrencies, most of them demonstrate great creativity, such is the case of Audius ($AUDIO), a platform dedicated to music content, an activity that in times of pandemic generates a lot of attention in much of the crypto-enthusiast community.
Audius proposes to equalize shares in the music industry, making creators receive fairer remuneration for their work. Its developers know very well that music moves people, and that's why it also generates billions of dollars annually per year.
But the problem is not the amount of money the music industry produces, but the way it is distributed. In the traditional scheme, creators, without whom there would be no pieces to listen to, get, at most, 12% of that mass of money.
This distribution looks quite uneven, if we compare it with what happens in the sports field, for example. The National Football League (NFL) allocates at least 47% of its income to pay athletes, and the NBA does the same. Its players receive 49% of the money that comes into the association. This is where Audius puts a stop to the disparity and offers an alternative way for creators to obtain income according to their effort and talent.
Audius' proposal is a Marketplace based on blockchain technology, where artists and fans interact directly and where artists' earnings, mainly, do not remain in the hands of the chain of intermediaries that prevails in the traditional system.
Audius comes to blockchain
The Audius project was conceived in 2018, emerging from a person who has been in the bowels of the music industry. Ranidu Lankage, an Indian hip-hop artist who had a contract with Sony and whose songs were broadcast on MTV, is responsible for the idea.
Audius recently completed its testing phase, and is now running on its mainnet. On the other hand, the platform has suffered from some instability in its operation, the reason is not the opening of its mainnet itself, but the announcement by Audius calling for registered artists and fans to claim a portion of
$AUDIO, the native token of this project.
Audius suggests token holders to use their $AUDIO to enter the exclusive Discord channel reserved for them by registering on the @AUDIOphile server.
This airdrop of $AUDIO is intended for about 10,000 users of the platform. These accounts were selected according to the interaction they have had with the network.
Uploading songs, sharing links, reposting articles and carrying out other activities helped them to obtain this privilege. Each user account will receive around $5,000 AUDIO, (USD 7,900 at the current token price).
If this seems like a good recognition to support Audius, it is necessary to mention that some artists who lead in contributions to the network will receive a gift of around 60,000 $AUDIO, the equivalent of almost USD 94,800.
Audius infrastructure basically involves two types of nodes: discovery nodes and content nodes. The discovery nodes carry the catalog of the audios stored in the network. We say "audios" because it's not just songs that are transmitted via Audius streams. The digital version of what would be a radio program, podcasts, are also available on the service.
The content nodes, on the other hand, are the custodians of the files that are indexed by the discovery nodes. The material uploaded by artists and creators is stored in them.
Technologies such as Inter Planetary File System (IPFS), distributed ledger (DLT) and Kubernetes are involved in the maintenance of the Audius catalog and content. Audius employs an adapted version of IPFS, which it calls AudSP.
The requirements for running an Audius node are far from straightforward. For starters, a public, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encrypted DNS address is required. In addition to the amount of $AUDIO in reserve, Audius requires professional technical support for the equipment.
Each node must access the Internet through a high-speed connection, have a minimum of 16GB of memory, and four physical processors (CPUs). In terms of storage space, solid state disks (SSD) or M.2 NVMe PCIe drives are required.
If it is a discovery node, the disk must have a capacity of 250GB; in the case of content nodes, the requirement increases to 2TB. Recall that these are the basic requirements.
As mentioned above $AUDIO will have several uses within the Audius platform. One of them will be to confer to its owners special access for certain services.
Another activity for which $AUDIO is provided is staking, and this only by running nodes that collaborate in securing and governing the network.
Nowhere on its website or in its whitepaper does Audius mention rewards for holding $AUDIO tokens in a wallet, or make reference to protocols such as proof-of-stake (PoS) or its delegated version (dPoS).
However, we assume that ordinary users will be able to do staking by letting manage their tokens by specialized DeFi services, or by lending them to nodes of their choice.
Initially an issue of one billion $AUDIO was made. During the first over-the-air download that was executed in 2017, 50 million were distributed. According to CoinMarketCap, the amount of circulating tokens is 120 million and to date presents a value USD 1.58 per unit. This token can be purchased on the Binance platform.
Of course, as always it should be mentioned that this publication does not constitute any form of advice or investment recommendation in this project, the interested person should consider this material as purely educational information.