Apart From The Soundcloud, Audius Raises $5.5M 

Livestreaming App Called Audius

The need to cut middlemen out of music streaming so that artists get paid their fair share led to the development of Audius which comes out of stealth led by serial entrepreneur and DJ RaniduLankageby building a blockchain-based alternative to Spotify or SoundCloud. By listening to ads the users will pay for Audius tokens or earn them. Thereafter it is developed with a wallet which will then pay out a fraction of a cent per song to stream from the decentralized storage across the network as artists receive roughly 85 percent which is roughly 70 percent compared to the leading streaming apps. The rest of the charge goes to compensating whoever is hosting that song as well as developers listening to software clients where one of them will be built by Audius.

It is, therefore, planning to launch that the open-sourced product in beta later Audius already has found some powerful investors seeing SoundCloud be vulnerable to the cryptocurrency revolution as it has raised a $ 5.5 million Series A led by the General Catalyst and Lightspeed as the participation is from Kleiner Perkins, Pantera Capital, 122West, as also Ascolta Ventures. All of them come to be betting that Audius’ token grows in value making the stockpile it is keeping worth a fortune. Thereafter it could sell chunks of the tokens which is why to earn revenue instead of charging artists directly. 

As Lankage comments, the music industry is faced by the biggest problem which is that streaming is taking off and artists aren’t necessarily earning a lot of money as it can take three months or up to 18 months for those unsigned artists to get paid for streams and that what the crypto solves is that you can pay artists therefore in near Realtime making it fully transparent. Here the biggest question posed is whether Audius uses the token economy to thereafter crack the chicken-and-egg problem to get the first creators and listeners on a platform which might be less functionally robust than its traditional competitors moving parts to decentralize as there are also plenty of disgruntled musicians out there waiting for something better. 

The Journey From Sri Lankan Hip-Hop Star To Serial Entrepreneur

Many start-up guys don’t have Billboard charting singles on their bio whereas Lankage has being born in SriLanka, his hip hop songs in his native tongue of Sinhalese comes to be the first of the language to be played on the BBC as also MTV. Later on, as he got signed to Sony, and also went platinum but left the label thereby seeking greater control over his work. Following this going to Yale, he applied his music business knowledge to build Reddit for dance music called The Drop along with Justin Kan. 

Thereafter the two teamed up again on a video version of the Q&A app Quora called Whale which fizzled out as his next venture was Poly a polling tool built as a complement to Snapchat inspired by the now super-popular Instagram Stories polls and questions stickers as after an acquihire by Reddit fell through making his return to his first love: music. 
According to him, he was always passionate about building tools for creators whereas now he wanted to focus on helping them turn their art into the profession as he teamed up with CTO RoneilRumburg who was employed as an engineering partner at the Kleiner Perkins building a crypto wallet called the Backslash and the head of product Forrest Browning who sold his software metering start-up StacksWare to Avi Networks. 

As Rumburg is quoted their goal comes to build a blockchain streaming music service as listeners don’t have to understand blockchains. Thereafter users wouldn’t even know that they have a wallet as they are just hearing an ad every once in a while, getting a subscription or paying per stream as Audius is open-sourced with developers able to build listening clients on top specializing in the discovery of certain types of music or offer their payment schemes. 

It Is Tokens, Not Record Labels

It is observed that Audius for starters focus on thereby signing up independent electronic musicians with those types that might be popular on SoundCloud having to pay for hosting there as it is not getting much back due to the platform’s weak monetization options. Hence don’t expect U2 and Ariana Grande on Audius at least for now whereas the start-up differentiates by offering access to content you won’t possibly find elsewhere. 

As Lankage explains to get artists on board Audius plans to use token incentives while the willing ones jump on first before many listeners could get a bonus allotment of tokens which might be worth more in case they help popularise the service as to where the artists go their fans are sure to follow with the hope that artists are sure to share its links first in case that’s where they’ll earn the most money. 

Wrapping Up The Discussion

To help develop its blockchain product and artist relationships Audius has lined up a legion of advisors with big-name including Augur co-founder Jeremy Gardner, EDM artist 3LAU, EA co-founder Bing Gordon and more of them that they cannot announce yet. User experience comes to be the linchpin of Audius as the system is seen to be more complicated where listeners and artists stay elsewhere with a DJ earning more per stream from Audius whereas Spotify or SoundCloud offers even better ways for fans to subscribe to them and generate more plays long term. In case Audius hides the nerdy bits while solving the problems of the music industry, it truly has the potential to be one of the first mainstream consumer blockchain projects treating the tech as a utility not just a new stock market to bet on.