How To Earn $AUDIO & Cryptocurrency With Your Music Through Audius

Audius is a decentralized music streaming platform. On the outside, it functions similarly to SoundCloud & Spotify with a few unique twists.

1. Audius allows artists to upload unlimited music & see advanced metrics & stats… for free… forever. Yep, you read that right. Audius promises never to charge artists one penny (or token) to upload music unlike their competitors. 

2. For listeners, you can stream music in high-quality 320 kbps. The highest sound quality of any free music platform. 

3. You can also upload exclusive content for super fans to unlock, such as downloading stems of your compositions or secret remixes you’ve made.

However, the biggest difference with Audius is artists aren’t earning fiat currencies (USD, GBP, EUR, etc.) for their streams.

You’re earning $AUDIO tokens for community involvement and special interaction with the platform. 

The $AUDIO token is built on blockchain technology just like cryptocurrency.

With the dozens of companies out there like Amazon Music, Deezer, Spotify, Napster, TIDAL, & more, why should an artist start to use Audius?

For starters, if you’re an early adopter of Audius, you have much higher chances of benefitting from using the platform. 

Take early investors into Bitcoin for example. 

Way back in yesteryear, Bitcoin was valued below $10 per coin. Today, it’s valued over $50,000 per coin. That’s a 5,000X increase!

How would you like to invest $100 and get $5,000,000 back?!

Obviously, there’s no guarantee the $AUDIO token is going to do that, but the more users Audius gains, the more value the token will have.

The Audius team also does seem to value artists a bit more than their competitors.

In fact, for some of the early artists on the platform such as Alina Baraz, she earned over 10,000 $AUDIO tokens so far and has about 93,500 total plays on the platform.

Once you get to a certain tier of $AUDIO tokens, you get a badge on your profile. 

As of March 30, 2021, 10,000 $AUDIO = 17.789 ETH according to Uniswap.com.

1 ETH = $1,838.61 USD

$1,838.61 USD x 17.789 = $32,707.03

That’s about $0.35 per stream compared to $.00437 for Spotify.

For comparison, using a Spotify streaming royalty calculator tool, 93,500 streams equals roughly $408.59. 

Not only do artists have the opportunity to earn a stake in the company, but listeners do too!

When you listen on Spotify or Apple Music, you either pay THEM a subscription fee or have advertisements served to you so artists & stakeholders can make money. However, with Audius, top community users can earn $AUDIO coin for essentially the same functionality that other apps have.

At the end of the day, people want to hear music. 

And if Audius is offering both the music and the rewards for using the platform, why wouldn’t artists & listeners want to use it?

Audius plans on having fan-powered royalties, similar to SoundCloud. Instead of treating every stream with the same royalty rate, users will have the option to give more token per stream to their favorite artists. 

Also, Audius will be built on self-governance. This means the community will vote on potential new features to include in the platform. 

Artists have complained for some time about the streaming rates, lack of transparency, & bureaucracy of platforms like Spotify. However, with Audius, musicians would have a say so in voting power.

In October 2020, Audius dropped $8M worth of it’s token to the top 10,000 users on the platform. 

Just recently, they’ve announced more systematic plans to award $AUDIO tokens to users.

Here’s how you can start gaining stake in Audius. 

1. Have A Top 5 Weekly Trending Track On Audius: Each Friday at 12:00pm Pacific Time, the top 5 trending tracks will each receive an on-chain reward of 100 $AUDIO sent to their Audius wallet. They’ve updated the Trending page to show a crown next to the top tracks 👑

2. Have A Top 5 Weekly Trending Playlist: As with Trending Tracks, the top 5 trending playlists as of 12:00pm Pacific Time on Friday afternoon will each receive an on-chain reward of 100 $AUDIO sent to your Audius wallet.

3. Be a top 10 Monthly API App: If you drive traffic to Audius, starting in May 2021, you’ll receive an on chain reward of 500 $AUDIO to your Audius wallet.

4. First Verified Account Upload: If you’re verified on Twitter or Instagram, Audius will verify your account on their platform as well. Simply upload your first track and tag @audiusproject on Twitter and/or @audiusmusic on Instagram and a member of the Audius team will reach out to you to confirm your reward!

Once you’re eligible for these rewards, a member of the Audius team will reach out and ask you to verify your phone number either through Twitter, Instagram or email. Once you’re verified, you’ll receive $AUDIO directly into your Audius account! And if you don’t hear anything from them, feel free to reach out via social media DM or email to redeem your rewards.

To trade your $AUDIO tokens for cash, follow these instructions:

- Use Uniswap to transfer the $AUDIO token to Ethereum.

- Use a crypto wallet like Coinbase to transfer from Ethereum to USD, EUR, or other currencies.