Audius (AUDIO) is a decentralized music streaming protocol that was initially built on the POA network and now operates on Solana. It was launched with the intention of addressing the inefficiencies of the music industry, such as opaque music rights ownership and intermediaries that stand between artists and their audience. The platform, powered by its native AUDIO token, allows artists to upload music that fans can access without additional charges. The music is stored and distributed by content and discovery nodes. Audius currently rewards content creators with features like inclusion in the weekly trending lists and aims to integrate stablecoins for artists to offer paid content.

The Audius ecosystem comprises four main participants: artists, fans, content nodes, and discovery nodes. Artists publish content on the Audius content ledger at no cost, and the music is streamed at a high quality. Fans can access tracks without additional charges and have the opportunity to stake AUDIO to participate in artists’ growth on the platform. Content nodes maintain the availability of content on AudSP, the platform-native extension to IPFS, while discovery nodes index metadata queryable by users, enabling them to find new content. The platform includes artist tokens to facilitate monetization, subject to artists staking AUDIO.

Audius seeks to provide a platform where artists can experiment or share bonus tracks, and fans can access these tracks without additional charges. Fans have the opportunity to stake AUDIO to participate in artists’ growth on the platform. They can also showcase their verified NFTs through the platform and earn different badges. Artists could choose to run their own content nodes and maintain greater control over their content distribution.

Audius was founded in 2018 by Roneil Rumburg and Forrest Browning, two California-based entrepreneurs. Roneil Rumburg is a Stanford University alumnus who co-founded Kleiner Perkins, an early-stage seed fund investing in blockchain and AI companies. Forrest Browning, also a Stanford alumnus, is a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient and a co-founder of StacksWare, an enterprise data center management platform. The team is complemented by 21 other employees and backed by a host of other illustrious names. The total supply of AUDIO is 1 billion tokens, with a current circulating supply of 411m AUDIO. The annual increase in supply is 7%, and 50 million AUDIO were distributed to the top 10 artists and fans, with 75% going to artists based on stream count.