'Music on Mainnet: The Future of Streaming' - Roneil Rumburg

and this is uh a talk i'm particularly excited about and um our next talk is going to be um who's going to be talking about the future of streaming and audio so it's been a pretty interesting week for for him and audience and uh there's a lot of things that have happened this week in the world of entertainment and uh without further ado i'll let romeo kick off and not tell us about what's happening welcome to neil hey hey thanks so much for having me karthik and and everyone watching thanks so much for uh taking the time i'm excited to share a little bit more about you know what we've been up to lately and then more broadly i think uh you know kind of keep the focus here on on what's been happening in our community with community ownership in in general it's been i think just a really exciting uh kind of um undercurrent of use cases that are emerging around how we can build the next generation of platforms in a way that actually enfranchises the users of those platforms um with control of the uh of the underlying protocol and community so um so yeah to get kick us off though actually i did want to take a minute to recognize like we've had some really really cool folks uh submit stuff uh under the kind of um uh under the audience uh prizes in the hackathon um and and catalog ended up being the the winner d beats and eero ero were the two runner-ups that we selected all really cool projects uh i would suggest you uh you try them out and play around i think it's it's a really cool way to kind of show how we um we can kind of help artists start to engage with some of the uh the concepts that us as as the eth community have been developing for so long so uh yeah just wanted to take a moment to recognize those um just as a quick background like what is what is audience for for many of you all this might be the first time you're hearing about us we're a digital streaming service that connects fans directly with artists and exclusive new music that direct is the key piece though so audience is fully decentralized has been operated by the community for the last year or so since uh since we launched um and uh just last week actually there was a uh uh kind of you know the the protocol crossed over into being mainnet basically the the actual token powering the protocol being live actual uh uh value being able to change hands in the system uh so we're really excited about that um and yeah this is just an example of an artist's profile on audio so they can upload tracks share this profile out with folks folks can come discover consume it the the big question this probably raises this like why do we care about decentralized music or community owned music distribution um just put very simply the way that the music industry is structured from kind of a revenue perspective is is i think reflective of the more systemic issues there around the number of middlemen and the amount of control uh that is exerted by folks who are like not actually the ones creating music and creating um uh creating like the stuff that is actually driving all of this interesting behavior right um so artists only capture 12 of music revenue today um and and that's really what audience exists to change uh to allow artists to own their own means of digital distribution um so yeah as i mentioned we launched uh uh publicly in september 2019 uh and really excited to share today actually uh or or yesterday uh officially was uh when we first for the first time crossed over a million monthly listeners on audio so uh that means in the last 30 days over a million people uh uh came to audience and and listened to music here uh we've had 150 000 tracks shared by 40 000 artists um and uh we see over 40 million uh requests to the audience api to pull content pull metadata pull whatever um every month right now so all of our stats are public because all of the nodes that run on the network are public and you can actually just go to the dashboard.audios.org link there and see in real time like what's happening what tracks are trending who's sharing stuff um and it's been just really really cool i think to see like a lot of uh uh kind of household names in in music actually getting really excited about uh uh decentralization right and and the web three tech that our whole community has has been working on together for so long um so to get into this like kind of the the actual meet of what i'm excited to talk about here is uh you know what what we tried uh to build with this initial launch of the audience token that happened last friday was a means to more scalably and equitably distribute ownership uh among the users of of a platform over time right and we're not the first ones to do this uh there are a lot of experiments that have happened in in our community and i think uniswops recently was was one of the most successful right um where where they actually were able to kind of look at retroactive usage of uniswap and kind of basically kind of reward that behavior proportionally um in audience we kind of uh tried to to adapt that way of thinking to what are what are the kind of top users of of a um of a music service right um in our case there was basically a formula that determined kind of a score or relative score to other users based on um you know tracks shared number of followers number of times you've engaged with other content on audios and a number of other things um it was just really cool to see like all of these uh artists and creators on our network actually like starting to learn about and engage with crypto for the first time in uh in this way so you know audience was always has has been decentralized since uh our launch in in september 2019 but a lot of that detail i think we were able to abstract away from uh from the end user quite effectively using things like meta transactions and and other flows such that like all of those interactions were actually making their way on chain um oftentimes to this uh uh kind of um ethereum side chain called poa network that uh many of you are likely familiar with um but uh in this case we were actually able to use that meta transaction flow to kind of let people see oh i have audio tokens to claim they could click claim and and claim those into their wallet which was a which is a non-custodial uh wallet that every user of audience has had since creating an account um so yeah it ended up being just i think a really a really neat moment for our community and and i think sets the stage going forward uh uh solidifying like the the expected uses of the token which the three are kind of governance so voting on changes to the protocol securing the protocol so staking on those nodes that i mentioned that are hosting content and hosting metadata and feature access so artists can actually stake these tokens to access additional features within uh within audience over time um so i guess like going forward i'm really excited to see um you know how i guess how both our community the audience community as well as you know other uh uh projects within our broader eth and crypto community start to think about um distributing ownership in ways that actually sort of enfranchise users in in the the growth of uh of the tools that they're helping to to build value in right um and uh yeah i think it's you know among the first i think to be doing this for like a more end user consumery product the level of like education that happened to happen had to happen sorry among our user base was uh quite a bit higher than i think it was for like a lot of d5 projects for example that have uh done similar things but um yeah i think the thing i i just really want to call out here is uh uh i think audience is a small part of this but more broadly in our community we're at this kind of inflection point where like this kind of the ethos and idea of community ownership is one that like we're actually all we all have the tools now to put uh you know put put actual like effort towards uh uh realizing these things right um in the case of audience the the way that made the most sense to execute this was via issuance over time so there are 70 to 100 million new audio tokens minted every year by the network and those get distributed to the community via staking and via other mechanics that you know the community has the opportunity to vote on and vote into place over time um and uh yeah so that's that's about it uh i wanted to keep some time here for questions um so i'll uh uh kind of kick things back over uh over there but uh thank you all for listening thank you all for uh stopping through and uh excited to to be here and be part of uh this whole community thank you so much uh o'neil i uh this is super exciting to hear i feel like uh you're you're down playing this a little bit but uh it's a huge milestone for for you and the team uh a million users uh is is nothing small of amazing and incredible so congrats on uh reaching that um by far absolutely the the biggest step that there is in the web3 ecosystem so congrats thank you so much karte so uh we do have a couple questions coming in uh the first one i have is kind of um who are some of these artists that you'd really love to adopt a kind of uh audience and just a decentralized platform in general as uh kind of their first choice and sort of how do you go about uh pitching it to them as a platform yeah that's a great question so um i think we we the obvious really serving um you know a broad spectrum of users everyone from kind of the like bedroom producer dj rapper who's like just making music for the first time and wants to have some place to share it and wan you know have an equal opportunity to build a uh following in the same way that like platforms in in the past had allowed before changing rules on on folks and things like this right um all the way up to kind of you know we we do have a number of like larger artists that i highlighted there like skrillex russ for example just uploaded some content to audience for the first time uh rl grimes um halloween mix that he puts out every year is out on audio right now if anyone's into that go definitely go check it out um so we we really want audience to serve as this tool to build and own a following and then monetize that following how you see fit as as an artist right and i think that need is one that spans like all size of sizes of artists right at the small end of the spectrum um you know the the need is really to find your audience and find your footing on like what are what are the types of things that you enjoy making that you're able to like start to find an audience that also enjoys listening to um and then at the bigger end of things it it starts to you know the the sort of lines of questioning and thinking from artists starts to move more towards like you know what how does owning my audience actually help me like be better from a business perspective like how does this help me actually have a better business right um uh and i think that is uh you know fulfilling that side of things is the challenge for for our community going forward but um i think this drop uh that happened last friday was a really important first step there um like we heard so much great feedback from uh artists across the spectrum saying things like you know this uh this gave them the confidence to to uh you know continue working on music full-time when they were like getting ready to give it up for example or there are just so many things that like i think for artists to get to see their work rewarded in in in a really meaningful way right um when oftentimes you know just i think you know yeah artists just have uh uh have been so i guess like mistreated generally by platforms of of the past that's what makes them so excited about um just you know having a seat at the table right that's that's like all they want and it's it's uh it's it's heartbreaking to hear the stories of what would have happened elsewhere but it also feels uh you know we feel really fortunate to have this opportunity no that's uh that's really amazing to hear i think uh it is very much about finding a platform in people that believe in you and uh you kind of made that case really obvious for everybody um we do have a couple more questions so i'll just going to ask them in order and we'll see kind of based on time how many more we can go into but uh there's clearly a lot of new advantages now in the web 3d world especially as audience uses the best to build and uh kind of how do you think about audience and just in general the more decentralized student platforms sort of integrating and innovating on top of things like nfts and then kind of introducing visual arts on top of just music and entertainment and uh and curious to see if you've ever explored any of those things before or what may or may not be possible yeah so the coolest part about uh audience and i think about decentralized web platforms more generally is that anyone can build anything they want on on these things right like there is no kind of like obvious private api as such like when you think about how sound cloud for example like their features that are available within the soundcloud app that are not in their api like the api that the first party client the open source first party client consumes is the same one that like everyone else gets right like all of that is is there so um you know as a natural next step from that um we've already had a bunch of folks uh start to experiment with things like audio nfts that are hosted on audios so you can upload tracks privately to audience and actually use sort of the decentralized hosting part of uh this this protocol to host an audio nft um you know with that being the first step oh is that sorry that's a super cool idea i just i don't think yeah and then and then the step beyond that is actually like with the audio kind of content permissioning primitives you could start to have audio nfts that are only playbackable by the person holding the nft for example or maybe whoever they designate so i think like just this um i guess the broader or the more precise answer to your question is like we see audios as as this uh kind of like platform building block that can serve the use case of streaming really well but like our community's ambition is not to go do everything for everyone um i think there's uh uh there are a ton of folks in our community who've already stepped up to say like this is something i want to build right and i'm just gonna go do it um and and that's the coolest thing to see right uh because we we can't do it all um our our our team uh uh working on this and even our own community which is you know the the tens of thousands of artists and uh a few thousand folks in discord and elsewhere there's just too much to do for us right so um yeah oh that's incredible well uh we are running out of time so i will have to move on to the next talk but uh neil i wish uh you all the best with the scaling ladies even more and we hope to hear the two million monthly after user announcement soon and uh i really hope we can get connie to uh message you shortly well you all will hear about the two million user mark first karthik and everyone at youth global thanks so much for having me