As blockchain begins to make its way into more consumer applications, decentralized, Ethereum-based music streaming platform Audius has reached 5 million monthly users for the first time, Yahoo! Finance reports. That milestone makes Audius one of the biggest consumer-centric blockchain applications.
Fast facts
- Launched in 2019, Audius boasts approximately 100,000 artists, including big names such as Skrillex, Deadmau5 and Weezer. Using blockchain technology, artists on Audius are better able to monetize their work than through centralized platforms such as Spotify, giving creators more ownership and by clarifying licensing and metadata issues. It’s also a method of distributing new and yet-to-be released music directly to fans.
- Artists are not paid directly by Audius, but are supplied with the infrastructure needed to monetize their work, such as through the sale of non-fungible tokens. They are also rewarded through the distribution of Audius’s native token, AUDIO, whose price has been rising gradually since hitting a low of US$0.60 in mid-June after a boom in late March. It was trading at US$1.19 at press time.
- Audius’s user growth figures are similar to the rate of growth shown by streaming-giant Spotify at the same stage in development. Spotify was launched in Europe in October 2008, a global launch soon followed, and by December 2012 it had 5 million paid subscribers, although also had many additional non-subscriber users.
- Forkast.News recently reported on another decentralized application taking on an established giant — Dtravel, a decentralized home-sharing platform looking to compete with Airbnb that saw incredible user growth after launching in June, signing up 200,000 in its first month. By comparison, Airbnb took two-and-a-half years to sign up 50,000 people. Dtravel hopes to register 1 million properties by the end of its first year.