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- Audius has announced the introduction of Audius v1.0, which includes the rebranding to Open Audio Protocol and the launch of Artist Coins.
- The primary purpose of Artist Coins is to enable artists to distribute coins to their fans and run targeted campaigns.
Community-run music platform designed to directly connect artists and fans, Audius, has announced the realization of its 2020 whitepaper with the launch of the Artist Coins this week. According to the official press release, this brings the Audius ecosystem to a state of completeness.
The latest announcement, according to the team, comes along with the official 1.0 release (Audius v1.0). Not just that. The protocol stack has also been rebranded as the Open Audio Protocol.
The Background of this Initiative
In a post detailing the motivation behind this initiative, Audius explained that artists have, over the years, found themselves in situations beyond their control as “middlemen extract value and fans are left with no real ownership.” The decision to solve this problem partly motivated the creation of the company seven years ago.
According to Audius, its objective has been to empower artists to own their music, own the distribution, and improve their relationship with the fans. Even before this recent update, the infrastructure has been able to serve almost 400 million streams across apps.
The Artist Coins were created on the Solana blockchain and are also powered by Meteora to serve as the foundation of the Open Audio Protocol. Through this initiative, artists could drop coins to their fans, run targeted campaigns, and run quests, bounties, and activations.
Speaking on the general perception of the platform, the communication team of the project highlighted that Audius has always been known as a music app due to the domination of its audience by non-Web3-native artists and fans.
Within the crypto space, the conventional wisdom at blockchain conferences is that Audius was a 2021-era music NFT play. And while it is true that we built some awesome integrations in the collectible space before anyone else did (NFT-gated releases, NFT profile pictures, etc.), that was never the end goal. The technology behind Audius goes far beyond a single music app and has continued to grow in both usage and functionality year over year.
Why the Audius Protocol Rebranding
Explaining why it is rebranding its protocol to the Open Audio Protocol, the company stated that its user base is largely dominated by people who do not read “Crypto Twitter”. This means they usually get to understand the whole concept of Web3 from its site.
In this case, rebranding the protocol would represent or bridge users from “different worlds”. Interestingly, this aligns with the rebranding of Binance Labs to Yzi Labs highlighted in our earlier publication. While admitting that this approach could “separate its users too far,” it will also help Audius to be known and loved as the app it is.
According to the team, Audius would operate as the music app for the Web3 world while the Open Audio Protocol operates as the global music database.
As indicated in our previous news brief, Chainlink has launched the “Build on Solana” program to boost startup growth. According to our recent update, Bitwise analyst Danny Nelson has also hinted that Solana could “win the GENIUS Era.”
