We started Audius to democratize the music industry and enable the best possible experience for the entire online music community: artists, fans, and developers. Over the last year, an incredibly talented team and community of indie artists have convened around Audius, impassioned by our mission to give everyone the freedom to share, monetize, and listen to any audio they want.
Today, we’re excited to announce the open-sourcing of Audius and the beginning of an incentivized testnet for Audius service providers, who will operate creator nodes and/or discovery services in the network. Since we’re a decentralized project, anyone can provide these critical services to the Audius testnet now, and claim their future seat as an Audius mainnet service provider.
By staking tokens and operating a service, Audius service providers earn a share of revenue generated across the entire network. They also earn part of the inflation of the overall Audius token supply. Earnings of both kinds are proportional to their stake size relative to the network. More details on this can be found in the Audius Whitepaper.
Check out the code and learn about how you can get involved, as a testnet staker or developer, at Audius.org, the new Audius open source project home.
Once we’ve demonstrated that the testnet is ready for prime time, we will publicly launch the consumer-facing Audius app (audius.co), which is currently in private beta. Using the Audius app, everyone will be able to upload and share their content with the Audius listener community. Their content will be replicated, stored, and protected by the decentralized network of testnet service providers.
As we come closer to launching the Audius mainnet, we also plan to open-source the web interface for Audius, allowing anyone to replicate a consistent design style in their own applications built on the Audius protocol.When the beta has reached a sufficient level of stability, the Audius testnet content and service providers will be promoted to mainnet status. We also plan to conduct code audits and other structured testing during the testnet period.
While we certainly have more work ahead, we’re excited by this key project milestone and by what the next few months have in store. If you’re interested in joining this mission as a staker, developer, or in any other capacity, please reach out at contact@audius.co 🙏
