A partnership with the social media giant TikTok is causing a real price explosion for the blockchain-based music streaming platform Audius.
Large parts of the crypto space opened their trading activities today with a price minus. Not so AUDIO. The token of the blockchain-based music streaming platform Audius literally exploded overnight and was trading at $ 3.48 at the time of going to press – an increase of 110 percent. The reason for this is the integration of the service on TikTok. Audius announced the cooperation on Monday via Twitter proclaimed. From now on it is possible to share music as “TikTok Sounds” on the popular Chinese social media platform.
Audius could hardly have chosen a better time for the cooperation. In July, TikTok stated that nearly 75 percent of US users would discover new music and new artists through the social network. For the music platform, this could mean further growth for the already increasing number of users. While Audius had just under a million active users in January, seven months later there are already five million. The number of artists has also grown and currently includes around 100,000 musicians, including real superstars such as Skrillex and Mike Shinoda.
TikTok expands monetization options
Co-founder and Audius CPU Forrest Browning is happy about the partnership with TikTok. In a statement he said:
We are proud to be one of the first partners of TikTok Sounds and to give the artists on Audius the opportunity to increase their awareness even further.
Audius CPU Forrest Browning
CEO Roneil Rumburg explains further details about the TikTok cooperation in an interview with the RollingStone:
The artists we spoke to want to find better ways to connect the following they’ve built on TikTok with other places where they can better monetize their work.
CEO Roneil Rumburg to RollingStone
Decentralized music streaming with Audius
Audius differs significantly from the business model of the established providers – especially when it comes to paying the artists. Spotify, for example, lumps the income into one pot and then divides it according to the percentage of individual songs. The providers themselves collect the lion’s share of this, the rest of the money is distributed to the labels, which in turn only pass a fraction on to the artists.
It works differently at Audius. Because the interpreters can determine the value of their work themselves and monetize their streams themselves. The capital gained from this is then divided between the artist and Audius in a ratio of 90 to 10. AUDIO is used as a governance token, which can be pegged on the platform. This gives users a voting right that correlates with the amount of tokens used.
In the meantime, however, the centralized competition also seems to want to gradually advance into the crypto space. Spotify made headlines at the beginning of December last year when a job advertisement was searched for a crypto expert for payments. A switch to the blockchain technology as with Audius is rather unlikely – however, an early link to “TikTok Sounds” is.