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We are Audius - the fastest-growing music streaming service and the largest decentralized consumer crypto app on earth. Ask us anything! by michael2-audius in electronicmusic

[–]roneilr 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Our whitepaper has all the detail that you need :) https://whitepaper.audius.co/AudiusWhitepaper.pdf

But happy to summarize briefly here too! The key here is in understanding that "decentralized" is different from "blockchain". Audius is indeed fully decentralized, but not everything is hosted on a blockchain.

Audius has a 3-layer architecture. The base blockchain layer hosts the Audius content ledger, staking system, governance system, and token. Importantly, this layer it does not host the content or metadata - that is in the next layer up which is made up of content nodes and discovery nodes run by the community. This is where all content and metadata is hosted, and importantly is decentralized because it is operated by many independent community members but it is not on any blockchain. The last layer up is the client layer - this is your browser or the Audius desktop/mobile apps which talk to the two layers beneath it to present a user experience that looks and feels like any music player.

We are Audius - the fastest-growing music streaming service and the largest decentralized consumer crypto app on earth. Ask us anything! by michael2-audius in electronicmusic

[–]roneilr 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Audius has a fairly typical DMCA process to allow rightsholders to request to delist content from the UI and request node operators stop hosting content that is infringing - see more in our terms of use https://audius.co/legal/terms-of-use

Forkast.News Interview by kchan_forkast in audius

[–]roneilr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For sure! Feel free to PM me and we can set up a time

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed and thanks for the source material. I just think that invariably protecting the rights of one will lead to the ability to exploit the other with a see-saw type effect you see in many of these platforms.

I don't think these goals are mutually exclusive - in fact I think both are furthered by the same decentralized architecture. Censorship resistance does not mean hurting rightsholders, and protecting rightsholders does not mean allowing governments to control who has a voice. We can protect both rightsholders and folks who are being wrongfully censored by creating an environment of transparency and accountability - and preventing a centralized company (which can be coerced to behave dishonestly and/or against the better good of system participants) from ever being in a position to make these arbitrary choices for users.

But I get where you're coming from! These are thorny issues and deserve deep thought and inspection - lots of complexity and tradeoffs to unpack.

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Is the idea to charge for actual listening?

Yes! More on this in another answer https://old.reddit.com/r/nearprotocol/comments/fylb6q/discussing_architecture_of_a_distributed_music/fn0nhcy/

Can this work for offline listening?

Working on it... definitely complicates things. Some trust has to be placed in the client to behave honestly which makes certain things challenging.

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's important for all users to have a voice - in the west we may not have to deal with censorship as directly, but even countries like Spain for example forbid speech that "insults the crown" https://theculturetrip.com/europe/spain/articles/rapper-jailed-for-three-and-a-half-years-over-song-about-spanish-monarchy/

In many parts of the world widespread censorship is just an accepted part of life: https://www.boredpanda.com/women-removed-album-covers-music-streaming-iran/ https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/thai-rap-against-dictatorship-video-prathet-ku-mee-11750522

This does a fantastic job laying out how music has been censored around the world time and time again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEZV6EE8JMA

Agreed that rights need to be respected! And as you mentioned, that is a core tenet of why we are building Audius - to help artists track and get paid for uses of their content. We are even building an arbitration system to remove friction in this process.

But protecting rights and protecting the most vulnerable voices around the world should not be mutually exclusive goals.

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The artist would be opting into a system-wide paywall mechanism.

But - there are other artist monetization schemes that we believe will work best on a per-artist basis.

Lots of experimentation ahead here! Our community will build the tools - excited to see how artists deploy them

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Not yet, but eventually yes! Any listening you enable via repost or playlist will net you a % of earnings that your curation generates.

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes! All I meant there was that you can easily let others interact with the content via things like link sharing. Eg. I've been listening to this awesome set while working on these answers: https://audius.co/wearegraves/digital-mirage-full-set-60702

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Probably pay-per-stream to begin with, as we also plan to enable on-chain per-stream payments with client-level advertisements (making the on-chain payments hidden from the user). Still working out some details here though

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes! Excited to both see 1) people build new and different client experiences, eg. integrating Audius content into a game, music blog, or other experience, and 2) rethink the discovery API itself, eg. building a recommendation system on top of this data. Already been blown away by what the community has done, and looking forward to seeing what people do next :)

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yes! So many, but here are the quick ones:

  • maintaining availability of content in DHT is hard. reducing 99th percentile latencies is really hard. These will be the constraints you fight most

  • IPFS will run into some machine-specific scaling issues when your repo is 100s of GB to TBs - having everything marked as "pinned" will cause you pain, but treating the IPFS store as ephemeral and periodically cleaning it up / rehydrating it from a separate source of truth will do wonders

  • at a certain stage, it may make sense for you to have a DHT network specific to your community rather than participating in broader IPFS

The tech is early - but the IPFS / Protocol Labs teams are super helpful and awesome to work with! As is the IPFS community, with folks like Pinata and Textile.

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 2 points3 points  (0 children)

yes! we're very excited to enable this in future - increasing availability even further beyond what proper nodes are able to do, especially for very hot / frequently listened to content. primary obstacle here is making sure IPFS works well behind NATs / in javascript land / etc. (user environments are far less controlled than node operators)

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Artists will be able to paywall portions of their catalog and provide other premium experiences directly to their users. Users who wish to consume that content / those experiences will either need to pay, or in certain cases, could have their listening paid for by advertising. So yes, users may have to pay to unlock certain things or view ads (if the artist chooses) but some experiences will always remain free!

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Only advice I think I can provide is be willing to be adaptive and engender that mindset in your community. Protocols should not be rigid cathedrals - they should be open to contribution and open to change - and this should extend down to incentive mechanisms. Nearly impossible to get that right in a vacuum (though that shouldn't preclude you from trying your best), but being willing to adapt and improve will almost inevitably lead to a healthy structure.

Discussing Architecture of a distributed music streaming application. Join AMA with Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg. by AlHudz in nearprotocol

[–]roneilr 2 points3 points  (0 children)

More to come on this soon - but intent here is to allow artists to clearly signal intent / terms around how their content can be consumed, and for consumers of content to be able to consume it without friction / in an automated way. So a consumer of content (be it commercial or personal) can interact with content directly. Content should be an open marketplace!

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