How do you Earn from Audius? Can You Stake the Crypto?

The music business is one of the hardest industries for an artist to make money and Audius is hoping to fix this. The reason it's SO hard is that there are lots of middle people that take most of the money.

In 2017 the music industry created 43 billion U.S. dollars and only 12% went to the artist. NFL players captured 47% of the revenue their industry made.

Then Covid 19 happened and this "really" hurt musicians because live events make up a majority of their income.

Someone can earn money with Audius with staking. Artists can earn money by setting their own fees using the Audius platform.

Keep reading and I'll share how Audius works, the advantages and the challenges the project faces, how TikTok influences it and what the AUDIO token is used for.

What the Heck Is Audius?

Image Spotify or Soundcloud but it's on a blockchain? The benefit of a blockchain is fewer FEES therefore musicians keep more of their money.

You're probably wondering "Ok, how much more money would a musician get on Audius?"

Just a ballpark figure a musician would get around $0.35 cents per stream. This may sound like peanuts, but compared to Spotify which pays musicians around $0.00437 per stream It's a large raise!

Plus, they are trying to make more improvements with payment by having them faster and easier to pay through the world.

Another large benefit is there is NO banning of songs and censorship.

The crypto project is also trying to give musicians more control over how they communicate with their fans and how their music is discovered.

Yes, the "Free Britney Spears" movement would be happy. If you don't know about the "Free Briney Spears" movement it's about the musician Britney Spears suffering mental breakdowns and her dad controlling everything.

The Audius crypto project got its start in 2018 by raising 5.5 million dollars from venture capitalists. In October 2020 the Audius token was being traded on top exchanges.?

What is the AUDIO Token?

The token is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. ERC-20 stands for "Ethereum Request for Comments" and 20 is a random number that helps organize the token.

You could think of ERC-20 as WordPress if you want to create a website. It makes it simple to create a token that runs on the Ethereum blockchain.

This simplicity helps wallets and exchanges take the token.

AUDIO has a supply of 1 billion and there are around 400 million in circulation at the time of the blog post.

The token is currently used for 3 main reasons.

1- To run a discovery or content node.

• Discovery nodes are used to store and pass on audio content.
• Content nodes are used to store other data such as (profiles, playlists and followers).

2 - To pay for features and services.

• These services include things as badges, artist tokens and voting power for what the artist does.

3 - Governance

• The token is also used to vote on what happens on the Audius project.

Below is a picture of how the business model would work.?

Audius Staking and Making Money!

Someone like you or I can earn money with the AUDIO token with staking. Someone needs a minimum of 100 AUDIO tokens to participate. If you want to stake these tokens the easiest way is to click on this link HERE and follow the directions.

All AUDIO tokens that are staked have to go through a 7 day wait period to get their money out. The estimated annual return on staking the coin is around 7%.

The second way to earn money is by buying the token and hopefully the price rises and you can sell it for a profit.

The third way to earn money is by running a content node or discovery node. Someone would need to have at least 200,000 AUDIO to run either of these nodes.

At the time of this blog post, an AUDIO token is worth $2.45 so someone would need around $490,000 to run a node.

Advantages and Disadvantages to Audius

One of the great things Audius has going for it is there are "problems" in the music industry. Cutting out the middle person and allowing artists to go direct to consumers on a blockchain is going to be BIG.

The project has over 5 million monthly users and the best part is they did this in less than 1 year. Keep in mind this project is still VERY new!

More good news is this crypto project is FREE for artists. More good news is Audius is planning on giving artists complete control over how they are monetized.

The interesting thing about this model is the possibilities. Maybe, someone can only access music if they purchase an NFT that the artist made.

Who knows what artists will come up with on how to get paid "They are creative by nature!"

For some reason, I'm thinking of the movie "Nerve" someone might have to jump through hoops the artist wants to access their art! It was a GREAT movie.

The project does have some good ideas for the future including stable coin payments, social tokens, micropayments, NFT's and others

Every project has challenges or negatives with it and it's good to know what they are! The biggest challenge with Audius is censorship and being able to remove content.

Audius claims to NOT have censorship yet what about Copywrite? What stops user "bigjeans55" from just uploading a stolen track and trying to make money from it?

Yea, Audius will NOT remove it. In the future Audius plans on introducing a community-based arbitration method to remove content. Still, I'm fascinated to know how this is going to work out and you can learn more about this by clicking on link HERE.

The next challenge is how it's going to be decentralized? It claims to be owned and operated by its users but 50% of the total supply of AUDIO is owned by a single wallet. Also, to make a proposal someone needs a few million dollars and MOST people don't have this.

The third challenge has to do with legal issues in the U.S. To make things simple the SEC (Security and Exchange Commission) doesn't want crypto to act like security (stock) to fund a company.

Bitcoin doesn't act like a stock but more of a commodity (gold) due to its computer mining.

The fourth concern is the project claims to have over 5 million active users, but there are some red flags that this number may not be true.

There are also some concerns about a secret founder called Ranidu.

Do the pros outweigh the cons, I'm not sure only you can make that decision.?

Audius and TikTok Deal?

Unless you live under a rock you probably know TikTok is a big social media platform. On August 17, 2021 Audius has integrated with the TikTok platform.

This means someone can "more easily" share music from Audius to the social media platform. Before this integration, someone had to hold up their phone to a speaker to integrate their music.

Another LARGE benefit is musicians will be able to link their following on Tiktok back to Audius. Not only is this going to help the musician earn money, but it's going to help Audius get more business.

Oh, and the consumer is going to win because it streamlines the process of buying music and supporting an artist.

Everyone wins except maybe Spotify and other streaming platforms.

Conclusion

Audius is a VERY interesting project that is in a good space. I would like to see more transparency, and legal problems cleared up.

Honesty and no legal problems are big things for me, but it's up to you if you want to support this project.

If you're wondering how you can purchase some AUDIO tokens the 2 places I've found is Uniswap and Binance. You can check out a recent blog post I did HERE on how to reduce fees for Uniswap!

I hope this blog post on how do you earn with Audius was helpful. Bye for now.