Recently blockchain-based music streaming service Audius distributed tokens to 10,000 of its top users, giving them ownership of the platform and rights to vote on its future plus make changes to its structure.
While its advisory board — which includes Twitch co-founder Justin Kan and EA Games co-founder Bing Gordon — is impressive (though all-male), I have my reservations about the platform. I’ll explain why in a moment.
Despite my reservations, I do believe Audius is on to something. When it distributed the tokens, they didn’t all go to artists, but also fans. Music is in desperate need for a digital economy more complex than one-directionally spreading out subscription fees over stream counts.
The ‘anti-SoundCloud’
From the beginning, Audius set itself up as “like SoundCloud, but not SoundCloud.” There’s a real difficulty in positioning yourself that way. SoundCloud is a company with more than half a billion USD in funding to date. It has relations with most of the music business, technical integrations with all kinds of hardware & software, and has spent over a decade building up its community, team and infrastructure.
The standards for music streaming are incredibly high now compared to the landscape that the current incumbents started out in. While I definitely think SoundCloud and other music streaming services of that generation are leaving space for newcomers to claim, I think it’s important to focus on what in particular a newcomer can do better and excel in that. In terms of doing a particular thing better, I’d argue Instagram has become the anti-SoundCloud.
How do you deliver a good user experience and an audience to people? How do you get them to regularly visit your app / platform? How do you grow beyond the front of the adoption curve? All of these have answers, but how do you do that better than others? Setting yourself up as a one-size-fits-all service creates expectations you can’t fulfill.
Takedown issues
On to a more complicated matter. Audius, as a decentralized service, will pass takedown requests on to uploaders who will have to take action. If it can’t be resolved, it moves to an arbitration committee made up of Audius users:
“That group can vote on whether a track legally should be removed or its revenue reattributed, and both plaintiffs and committee members must put up a small financial stake they’ll lose if their claim is frivolous or they make erroneous decisions.”
I appreciate the idealism in letting its community resolve these issues. The financial stake part also makes sense, assuming the party issuing is on the platform, but it also reads like the type of maximalist thought usually associated with blockchain or “disruptive startup” culture. It assumes as a newcomer it can set a new status quo that everyone will have to interact with — even people who are not on the platform. In actuality, as a newcomer you’re an outlier and the type of strategy you have to employ is growth, so you can actually become the status quo.
What does not help growth is artists finding parts of their catalogue on the platform without uploading it themselves and then going through a tedious and risky process to right the wrong.
A more complex economy
Another company I had similar reservations about in terms of being able to stand out as a compelling streaming platform is Resonate, a community-owned cooperative. However what excites me about Audius and Resonate are their visions for a different music streaming economy. In particular, giving fans and artists equal participation in that economy.
Money in streaming flows in one direction and that’s away from fans. It feels like that’s the point, but it’s also a limitation. There’s a reductionist vision that music services are solely about listening to music. Yet what could be created by incentivizing platform participation? What if the $10/month subscription fee was more like an entrance ticket or season pass and there’s additional, optional value exchange happening on the platform, much like in video games?
Some users wouldn’t be able to afford a fee higher than that $10. As a matter of fact, I know music fans who only stream from free services. By participating in the platform’s economy they could still unlock perks they’re after. They could do so by creating value on the platform, e.g. by building experiences, creating fan art and other value for communities, or by participating in platform improvements like the cleaning of metadata or, I suppose, DMCA takedown arbitration.
This type of thing has been happening in games for years. A current prominent example being Roblox (est. 2004), which recently saw Lil Nas X perform in-game.
The starting point isn’t the economy though — it’s to envision what you want players to be able to do in the world created for them. From engagement flow the opportunities to shape an economy (another reason why I’m skeptical of consumer-facing startups whose value propositions focus on the economy more than the user experience). In order to create robust digital economies around music, the likely question to figure out is how to create a compelling platform for fan culture at large.
Then starting by focusing on a specific problem.