By
Temitope Olatunji
April 24th, 2024
It was reported that the algorithm used to distribute the AUDIO governance token favored the artists over the listeners with about 75% of the tokens allocated to creators.
A fast-growing decentralized streaming protocol and a competitor of Spotify, Audius has successfully distributed $8 million in AUDIO, its native token to users who actively patronize the platform. This was strategic as the platform has amassed about 750,000 monthly users who distribute, monetize, and stream contents on its platform. 5% of its 1 billion tokens in circulation were distributed among the top 10,000 artists and fans to mark the introduction of the AUDIO governance token.
According to the report, this will provide the content creators and listeners the power to decide how the protocol should evolve in the future through their voting rights.
It was reported that the algorithm used to distribute the AUDIO governance token favored the artists over the listeners with about 75% of the tokens allocated to creators. The allocation was based on the number of streams generated as claimed by the report. Also, 10% of the AUDIO token allocation was based on the followers count with the remaining 15% distributed based on the number of songs favorited, favorited playlist, and the number of songs reposted.
The allocation saw the Audius team and advisors obtaining about 40.6%, platform investors obtaining about 36%, and the community governed-treasury being allocated 17.8% of the supply.
Audius was founded to offset the existing challenges in the music supply chain by reducing the engagement of middlemen and improving transparency using blockchain technology.
The AUDIO token currently has two main uses – with 1.4 million tokens locked up, it can be staked. Also, it allows users or holders to be able to access exclusive discord channels without any problem. Having criticized the traditional structure of the music industry, Audius intends to capitalize on the features of blockchain technology to increase the transparency surrounding any payment to content creators.
Audius Platform and AUDIO
Roneil Rumburg, the CEO of Audius in an interview said that it should not take more than a year for people to get paid and content creators taking just 12%. Sadly, artists have no visibility and knowledge of their audience or who is listening to them as they do not own their data. With the Audius P2P network, content creators can cash-out daily or hourly if they want and get paid instantly and directly in full by their listeners for every generated stream.
The Audius platform already has a couple of plans intended to be implemented in the future. It plans on supporting Stablecoins or third party tokens and also offer unique utilities for fans by ensuring that content creators minting “artists tokens” on Ethereum are largely facilitated.
The Audius platform and its projects are currently recording positive feedback and over 1 million streams are generated on the platform every month. Its token is currently trading at $0.16, and with an available supply of 120,000,000, it has a market cap of $19 million as of now. AUDIO in summary has the purpose of governance, feature access, and security.