We are excited to announce that Audius has raised a $5.5M Series A round with participation from General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Pantera Capital, Kleiner Perkins, 122 West, and Ascolta Ventures.
This support from some of the top investors in Silicon Valley is a testament to the strength of our team and mission.This funding will be used to build world-class engineering, design, and community development teams that are integral to our mission of building a decentralized community-owned protocol that will help support and defend the world’s music.
Audius is the first truly decentralized, community-owned and artist-controlled music-sharing protocol.It is a SoundCloud-like dAPP and an open protocol that helps artists with blockchain based attribution, distribution, and monetization for their content. Audius cuts out the middleman, connecting artists directly with their fans.
Our mission is to create a fully decentralized community of artists, developers, and listeners collaborating to share and defend the world’s music.
Presently, centralized music sharing platforms hoard user data in locked up databases. This results in a minority arbitrarily controlling the music distribution for the majority. As both creators and fans, we want to see a world in which all data is openly accessible to all artists, providing a true equality of opportunity and letting the music speak for itself.
Audius improves on existing music platforms in 3 key ways:
Platforms such as Myspace, Youtube, SoundCloud have all changed the rules on creators many times and we have seen artists lose their followings, views, and revenue streams again and again. We want Artists to create their following on a platform that will exist forever — regardless of the health of the company that runs it. This is the promise of the community ownership that blockchain based platforms like Audius brings.
Artists have never had control over the platforms where they contributed content. We at Audius believe artists should have the power to vote on changes to the Audius protocol, including issues like content distribution and monetization structure. By creating a community-owned level playing field for artists, everyone wins.
Artist payments on centralized platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud are slow and opaque. It takes anywhere from a month (for a fully independent artist) to 18 months (for a major label artist) to get paid for streams today. We can change this by using a blockchain-based public ledger to make near-instant, fully-transparent payments.
We are excited to share more about Audius and our journey in future posts and news articles.
Audius is over 10 people, and we’re growing quickly!We’re looking for world-class, driven, and passionate engineers and operators to join our team. If you’re excited about what we’re building at Audius, please reach out at careers@audius.co
