How To Earn $AUDIO & Cryptocurrency With Your Music Through Audius
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Written by Omari
With the recent buzz around music NFTs, cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, & Ethereum, musicians and labels have all been looking to see how they can start to integrate this fun, new technology into their music marketing & streaming strategies.
Right now, music artists earn fiat currencies through streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube & SoundCloud.
The payouts are notoriously slow, taking anywhere from 2-4 months for artists to get paid from the time their song is streamed.
But what if you could start earning cryptocurrencies & tokens with your music streams instead?
Enter the new kid on the block, Audius.
What Is Audius?
Audius is a decentralized music streaming platform. On the outside, it functions similarly to SoundCloud & Spotify with a few unique twists.
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.
For listeners, you can stream music in high-quality 320 kbps. The highest sound quality of any free music platform.
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.
Why Should Music Artists Want To Use Audius?
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.
Audius Royalties Vs. Spotify Royalties
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.
That’s a 67,417% increase in royalties for Audius vs. Spotify for Alina Baraz. Not too shabby!
Why Should Listeners Want To Use Audius?
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?
Potential Cool Features In The Future With Audius
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.
How To Earn $AUDIO Token With Audius
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.
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 👑
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.
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.
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.
How To Transfer $AUDIO Token To Ethereum & USD
How Audius Royalties Are Different Than Spotify & SoundCloud
Again, a main thing to note about the $AUDIO token is that it gets more valuable with the popularity of the platform.
Whereas on Spotify or SoundCloud, the value of your streams is only as good as the fiat currency it’s tied to.
While SoundCloud did roll out fan-powered royalties, they are not cryptocurrencies like with Audius.
How To Promote Your Music On Audius
Although Audius with 4,000,000 monthly users is much smaller than Spotify with 345,000,000 monthly active users, it still is worth a shot in our eyes to give promotion a go and be an early adopter on the platform.
If you’d like to drive traffic to your uploads on Audius, check out our music promotion options in the link below.
Right now, the best ways to promote on Audius are through reposts, playlist placements, or sending traffic to the platform through outside means like posting on other social media platforms or running Facebook & IG ads.
You can select our Facebook & IG ads management or other promotion options at the link below.
When your song is ready to go, it's time to start promoting it to potential fans! Omari has the best organic promotion services money can buy. With packages for Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, we will get your music the traffic and attention it deserves! Click below for more information.
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© 2023 Omari MC, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
© 2023 Omari MC, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
4 replies to "How To Earn $AUDIO & Cryptocurrency With Your Music Through Audius"
Why am I not able to claim audius token in my region ?
A reward for most plays is not a royalty for music. I found you can add an ISRC# to each track. Not sure if anyone is counting them yet though.
I can’t seem to find direct information as to how Artist get paid? I see that the percentage is a lot more than what you would get on any other streaming platforms but how do Artiists.get paid the crypto? Obviously with Spotify tidal Apple Music etc that is paid to aggregator who then pays out to us? Assuming it’s not the same here?
How is Audius better than NFT Music Stream for artists?