Today marks the most significant milestone for the infrastructure that powers Audius since its public launch in 2020. We’re introducing version 1.0 of the protocol, now reimagined as the Open Audio Protocol, secured by $AUDIO.
When we began building Audius nearly seven years ago, our vision was to create an open, interoperable, and free-to-use global backend for music. We wanted to build a protocol that would stand the test of time and empower artists to own not just their music, but its distribution and their relationships with their fans, free from centralized gatekeepers. Since then, we’re incredibly proud to have turned that vision into reality, having served nearly 400 million streams across apps built on top of the music catalog.
With the launches this week around Artist Coins, we believe that the state of the Audius ecosystem is at a level of completeness that we can “coin” it the official 1.0 release (currently, it runs at 0.7). In fact, Artist Coins are the last missing piece of the puzzle proposed in the original 2020 Audius Whitepaper (section 2.3), making the protocol feature complete. Of course, at that time, we could never have dreamed of how we could build it today. A lot has evolved in the creator and meme coin space over the years that makes a launch exactly like ours possible (Wallet UX, Solana, Meteora/Jupiter, Metaplex, RPC infra etc.), but this launch has always been part of the plan.
While we could not be more excited about the positioning of Audius in this next chapter, one thing stood out to us to address head on: our brand positioning.
Over the years, Audius has become much more commonly known as a music app, especially because our audience is primarily dominated by non-Web3-native artists and fans. Within the crypto space, the conventional wisdom at blockchain conferences is that Audius was a 2021 era music NFT play. And while it is true that we built some awesome integrations in the collectible space before anyone else did (NFT gated releases, NFT profile pictures, etc.), that was never the end goal. The technology behind Audius goes far beyond a single music app and has continued to grow in both usage and functionality year over year.
So, today marks not only the 1.0 release of the protocol, but the rebranding of the protocol stack as the Open Audio Protocol, along with a few brand new bells and whistles:
and lots more.
(read on at docs.openaudio.org)
It’s a good question. There is prior art in both directions on this. Dan Romero and the Farcaster team recently dropped the app name Warpcast and unified all their branding under Farcaster. On the other hand, teams like Uniswap have launched new brands such as Unichain for their protocol initiatives, and Circle has done the same with Arc, their L1 chain. What differentiates Audius from many other crypto projects though is that our (app-side) user base is made up of people who do not read “Crypto Twitter” and may even be getting their first introduction to Web3 on our site. This naturally calls for a brand approach that bridges both worlds.
An effort like this runs risks of separating our audiences too far, but it also lets us tackle what is most important and directly in front of us: how do we continue to carve out the path for Audius to be known and loved as the app it is and for the protocol itself to attract new builders to create the Spotify/Tidal/Apple Music killers of 2025? And in fact, we would welcome anyone building a music client/DSP that outpaces Audius in growth, built on the Open Audio Protocol. Seriously, bring it. WAGMI.
Going forward, now that the community has officially adopted these changes (proposal 157), think about it this way:
Audius is the music app for the web3 world. Its feature set is robust (chat, rewards, social, and much more) and can be your home base as an artist to connect with new fans. Seriously, why would you keep using SoundCloud?
And
The Open Audio Protocol is the global music database, open and boundaryless for all of us who reject the streaming status quo and imagine an internet where music looks more like Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision.
And all of the above is powered by $AUDIO.
We hope you join us on this endeavor. This is the next chapter, not the finish line.
