Audius (opens new window) gives artists control of their own music, and provides a censorship-resistant platform for expression and distribution of artistic works and compositions.
Today, the IPFS community is proud to share another video in the Building Web3 Video Series (opens new window), which is dedicated to technologists, teams, and visionaries who are building valuable tools and services for a Web3 world. The latest video features Audius (opens new window), a music and audio sharing platform that uses IPFS as the core decentralized storage component in their mission to give everyone the freedom to share, monetize and listen to any audio.
Though the advent of music streaming has been innovative for listeners, it has also come with issues: artists struggle to make money from streaming platforms and most artists are forced to make black box deals with labels and companies who often end up controlling the rights to their music in efforts to get their work distributed. Audius removes gatekeepers and middlemen to give artists a direct connection with their fanbase, while also providing its platform’s listeners with chances for real music discovery. By connecting artists and fans together directly, Audius’ mission is to give everyone the freedom to share, monetize and listen to any audio.
Audius has been using IPFS since 2018. At the time, IPFS had the only system that fit their decentralization needs, with no immediate lock-in or payment up front. Over time, IPFS has proven to consistently perform and provide the flexibility and resilience needed for their network. All files and metadata on Audius are shared using IPFS by creator node services, registered on Audius smart contracts, indexed by discovery services, and served through the client to end users. Audius runs nodes internally to test new changes, and there are a dozen public hosts running nodes for specific services and geographies.
In a case study report with IPFS (opens new window), Audius senior engineer Hareesh Nagaraj said, “Choosing a dependency on such a novel tech isn’t necessarily the standard way of doing things, but I’m really glad we did. The extensibility that it gives us is huge. Overall, it’s been a game changer for us."
Read Audius’ full case study with IPFS (opens new window) and learn more about Audius at https://audius.org/ (opens new window).