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- #8 - Audius maximus 🌞
#8 - Audius maximus 🌞
Your weekly music round-up: The Band Camino album review, Audius, vinyl records are making a comeback, Paramore and Ed Sheeran are on tour.
Here's what we have queued up this week:
🎹 Song recs based on what we're listening to.
🎧 Audius is our Sunlighter Spotlight of the week.
📈 Data on future nostalgia.
💿 Industry consolidation and continued focus on catalog acquisitions.
🤘 Tour announcements for next year are picking up.
Songs we're currently listening to 🎹
From the Vault 🔙
Donya's Pick
Chris's Pick
Sunlighter Spotlight: Audius 🎧
What is Audius?
Audius is a digital music community and artist discovery platform on a mission to solve the biggest challenges of the music industry: fair artist compensation and fan-to-artist connection. They are also the first streaming platform to be fully decentralized through blockchain technology, providing a more transparent and economic alternative to distributing digital music.
Roneil Rumberg and Forrest Browning co-founded Audius in 2018. Today, Audius hosts over one million tracks shared across the network from 250,000 artists and its ~7 million monthly users. The foundation of Audius is based upon artists having complete control of their fan base without being subjected to the traditional intermediaries of the music industry. Currently, Audius is backed by a strong team of high-profile musicians and creators. A few notable investors include: deadmau5, 3LAU, Steve Aoki, Katy Perry, Nas, The Chainsmokers, and Jason Derulo.
Fair Artist Compensation
Audius is owned and run by an open-source community of artists, fans, and developers. Because Audius is decentralized, no single person or group has control of the platform—all Audius users collectively retain control, and the data that enters the platform is irreversible, so all transactions are permanently recorded and visible to anyone on a public ledger. The entire business model is supported through blockchain technology and a number of crypto native infrastructure tools including Ethereum, Solana, The Graph, and IPFS.
Audius is powered by the platform’s token ($AUDIO, which lives on the Ethereum blockchain) and third-party stablecoins (dollar-pegged coins that are backed 1:1 to the United States Dollar). These tokens not only allow the transaction of money between the fan and the artist (in exchange for exclusive artist content, new songs, digital merch, etc), but it also gives users governing power over how Audius evolves over time.
Fan-to-Artist Connection
Whereas traditional streaming platforms value fans based on a monthly subscription model, Audius concentrates collective fan value through the $AUDIO token. Not only does the token allow fans to directly support their favorite artists, but it gives them the opportunity to invest in the longevity of the Audius platform (10% of all revenue goes to token holders). Fans are incentivized to earn more $AUDIO tokens by simply engaging with the platform, and Audius continues to develop features to support this fan-to-artist ecosystem. Most recently, they announced the $AUDIO Rewards program and have even expanded to other strategic brand partnerships.
Artists are realizing the power of redefining their audience, branding, compensation structure and music distribution. The upside is enormous and mutually beneficial to both artists and fans. We’re excited to see how Audius continues to build the next chapter in the evolution of music.
Data 📈
Future Nostalgia: No, not the Grammy award-winning pop album from Dua Lipa. This week, we're talking about vinyl records and how they're making a comeback in a big way.
A couple weeks ago, this newsletter from Chartr piqued our interest. While most everyone listens to music on a streaming platform, there's nothing quite like hearing the surface crackle, pops, and distortion of your favorite album on vinyl. The evolution of listener habits has come full circle from the 80s with the rise of vinyl making up 9% of music industry revenue just in the first half of 2022.
Industry Updates 💿
Gamesters to Napsters: A couple weeks ago, Napster announced it will focus on fostering, investing in, and acquiring the best Web3 music startups with former Roblox Global Head of Music Jon Vlassopulos as CEO. Napster was recently acquired by Hivemind, who also helped Limewire transform their business to an NFT marketplace.
Flight of the Concord: Concord, a music industry leader in the development, management and acquisition of sound recordings and music publishing, scooped up Phil Collins and his Genesis bandmates' publishing and recording music catalog for over $300 million.
Apple Music Reaches a Milestone: Since the invention of iTunes and the iPod, Apple Music’s collection of songs has reached a remarkable milestone of 100 million songs.
OTW in Singapore: You may recall in a previous newsletter that Ones To Watch, an artist discovery platform owned by Live Nation, has set their sights on aggressively expanding in Asia. They’ve continued that expansion into Singapore.
Prepping for the Concert Metaverse: Driift, an online events ticketing platform, has acquired Dreamstage, a live streaming concert platform.
Live Nation Expands in Germany: Late last month, Live Nation expanded in Germany by acquiring Goodlive, a Germany-based live events promoter responsible for Melt and Splash!
Tour Announcements 🤘
Paramore kicked off their fall tour earlier this week and have already sold out 14/19 shows.
Porter Robinson + Friends announce a Second Sky Music Festival after party show at The Warfield in San Francisco, CA on Sunday, October 30.
Drake is partnering with SiriusXM to host a one-night-only concert at the Apollo Theatre in NYC on November 11. Word on the street is you need to scan a QR code to secure a ticket.
LCD Soundsystem is set to play 20 shows at Brooklyn Steel from November 18-December 17.
Depeche Mode is back after a five year hiatus from performing live. They’re kicking off their Momento Mori tour next March
Five is the magic number this week as Ed Sheeran announced his North American dates to the Mathematics Tour in 2023, his first time on an official tour in North America in five years.
We mentioned previously that the Arctic Monkeys announced a tour in the UK & Ireland. This week, they announced their dates for their North American leg with Fontaines D.C.
Wrap Up 👏
We're closing the newsletter this week with a fleeting metaphor.
Lyrical Genius ✍️
Happiness is a butterfly, we should catch it while dancing.
I lose myself in the music, baby
Every day is a lullaby, try to catch it like lightning
I sing it into my music, I’m crazy…
How do you like our newsletter this week?We're all ears, click the number of 🔆 you think we deserve and feel free to drop a comment. |
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See ya next Sunday 😎
Chris and Donya
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