Audius, the first community owned music platform and largest decentralized service, officially launched its music marketplace today in beta, allowing its 6 million music fans to support their favorite artists with direct payments. Audius music fans seamlessly use their credit card to pay artists in USDC, which can be converted by artists and rights holders to the currency of their choice including USD, EUR, GBP, or most other currencies.
Alongside the core purchasing features, Audius fans can pay artists more than the list price for their music by adding extra payment to further support their favorite artists. These new innovations give creators control in pricing their music for access in streams and downloads, while delivering instant payouts. It’s a powerful new revenue stream for artists and rights holders.
In addition to direct payouts of US dollar denominated payments, the Audius Network is launching the $AUDIO Match program, a unique innovation that gives both artists and paying fans a 1:1 match of $AUDIO tokens for every purchase. For example, if an artist sells access to their music for $5 in USDC, both the artist and the fan will receive an additional 5 $AUDIO tokens from the Audius Network.
These $AUDIO token rewards are a strong incentive and benefit for creators who want to sell on Audius and also for the fans who want to support them. It’s a first of its kind rewards program in the music industry enabled by the unique community owned model of the Audius platform.
Beginning today, a select group of artists will be able to leverage the new monetization capability, including Kato on the Track, Matt Ox, RAC, Cheat Codes, The Glitch Mob, Daniel Allan, and more than 40 additional artists. Additionally, many independent record labels have signed with Audius to make more money for their artists including EMPIRE, Nettwerk Music, Circus Records, Bitbird, Anjunadeep, Anjunabeats, and several others. These partners and more artists and labels will come on line to take advantage of the new monetization feature in the coming months as the Audius Network makes its marketplace more widely available to all its participants. Interested artists and labels can sign up to the waitlist available here.
“When we launched Audius four years ago, our mission was to create an artist-centric platform where artists could take more control of their music and deepen their relationships with their most passionate fans,” said Audius Co-Founder and CEO Roneil Rumburg. “Today artists and record labels will be able to set their own price to unlock music for their fans — b-sides, new mixes and more. Empowering fans to make direct payments to the artists they love is a milestone moment for Audius and for all of the artists and labels who have made our community a key part of their offering to fans.”
Additionally Audius announced today that it has secured a deal with the world’s leading independent distributor DistroKid, which when fully integrated, will empower a huge number of independent artists to upload their music to Audius with a click of a button. It is estimated that DistroKid distributes more than 30% of all the world’s new music.
Audius also announced a partnership with Ampsuite, the label operations management platform owned by Beatport, the leading source of music for DJs, producers and their fans. The partnership will make it easy for hundreds of labels to distribute their music to Audius.
When these partnerships are fully integrated, they will empower independent artists to connect directly with their fans and earn more income in the Audius music marketplace. Leading up to the full integration of these distributor partnerships, artists can indicate their interest in participating in Audius by signing up on the waitlist.
Source : Medium / Nov 1, 2023