Audius- Decentralized Music Platform| Crypto Academy/ S5W3| Homework post for @wahyunahrul

Hello guys,

With a joyfilled heart, I welcome you to the Season5 week3 assignment post of the cryptoacademy, given by Prof @wahyunahrul.

Let's proceed immediately to his wonderful lecture

Before giving my opinion of the audius- platform, let's discuss a little about the music industry and how it relates to the audius platform.

Entertainment is not a new thing to us anymore, as it has become part of the human life, and we agree that entertainment is growing rapidly across the world.

Without the presence of entertainment in the world today, we would have had lots of suicide cases, many people would have resulted to taking drugs and all manners of malicious activities, inorder for them to feel refreshed.

But thanks to entertainment, many don't need any of those harmful substances to feel good, as entertainment has helped refreshed a lot of souls including mine.

Entertainment exists in different forms, entertainment can exist as movies, as video games, as memes and most importantly as music.

Music happens to be the most generally accepted form of entertainment.

Music can be referred to as orderly combined sounds or tones in temporal relationships to produce a composed melody having harmony and continuity.

Music can also be referred to as an art of creating pleasant combination of tones with rhythm, Melody and harmony.
Research shows that musics fill the brain with a chemical known as Dopamine and dopamine is a pleasure related chemical usually found in the brain.

Musics have the power to affect lives, positively or negatively, when a sad song is listened to, the listener tends to have a change of mood from happy to sad , so also when a happy song is played, the listener tends to experience an elevated mood.

Considering the importance of good music to the human life, upcoming artist are meant to be fully supported, but reverse is the case, they are being used.

For example, an upcoming female artist may have to give off her pride, her body, just to be signed to a musical label, and sometimes a huge amount of money would be requested from her.
Most times, after all these suffering, their content will be stolen from them, right before their eyes and they will feel hopeless.

It is at this juncture that the audis platform comes to play.

The audis platform is a crypto powered musical sharing platform, that strives to give artist full control over their uploaded content.
It does this by applying the knowledge of blockchain technology, and the blockchain technology is one in which all it's data recorded cannot be manipulated and it is seen by all.

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The audius platform was established by Roneil Rumburg and Forrest Browning, both men earned the IVY league degree from the study of computer science, that is, they are computer scienctist. They also happen to have a broad knowledge on cryptocurrencies, they are among the early Bitcoin investors.

Due to their love of electronic music, they initiated the development of the audius platform in the year 2018 and the platform raised the sum of $5.5million in August 2018.

The aim of the Audius platform is to help artist gain money, power, and fame by connecting them directly to their fans, their listeners, without the interference of middlemen.

As it presently is, music creators only get the most of their musical content when they align with a music label, they do so to create a copy right for their content, and such musical contents can only be monetized when it is promoted by the label company.

This company collects most of the profit of these young artist and it is wrong.

In the audius platform, 90% of the sales revenue goes to the artist while the other 10% is used to support the network.
The platform does not have a share from the funds generated from a musical content, instead, the platform is being sustained through investors with the AUDIO token.

In the audius platform, artist are given opportunity to choose how they want their content monetized, they can either sell their songs as NFTs or impose a one-time payment for all their content, but one truth remains; they remain the sole owner of their content.

The audius platform is opened to all music creators, they can easily upload and generate funds from their content without being signed to a label.

It is also good to note that artist with the top five trending playlists are awarded with audio tokens

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The above screenshot shows the price, rank and many more information about the audio token.

The audius blockchain attains it's Security by the use of two distinct decentralized node; they are:

• Content node
• Discovery node

The content node is the node responsible for hosting the content, it is the first node responsible for the processing of any music uploaded by an artist.

Artist who act as content node by hosting their music usually have authority and access over their content encryption keys,but for artist whose intention is to upload their content, such content are hosted randomly by selected nodes.

The discovery node is the node whose function is to attach playlists, user profiles and followers.
It is the node that functions after the operation of the content node has been completed.

The discovery node assist to record data and relate it to an artist profile.

The Audius platform is powered by the audio token, built under Ethereum blockchain.

From the analysis made, it is obvious that the establishment of the Audius platform is a very good initiative and it is the best method to help artist fully monetize and copyright their content.

Having considered this, shall we proceed to the next phase of the assignment

I will answer this question only based on the extensive research I have made.

From my view, I think that the governance system used by audius has indeed made audius a fair and fully Decentralized platform. I support this because of the following reasons;

• The first reason I believe that the audius platform is fully decentralized is because of the type of blockchain it is built on.
  The audio token is built on Ethereum blockchain which happens to be the second largest blockchain in existence.

And from research made, we have come to know that the Ethereum blockchain is one of the most secured network among it's pairs.

• Another fact I considered that made believe that the platform is fully decentralized, is one of it's features that enables artist to fully monetize their content.

The audius platform is developed in a way that artist get to select their preferred method on monetization, unlike the centralized system, where the authorities select a payment method that best suits them.

• The fact that artist can participate in protocol governance voting is another solid reason I believe that the system is fully Decentralized.

By this method, it distribute equal rights to every user, and welcomes opinion from all users in the platform, on how the platform can be enhanced.

• Another proof of being a fully Decentralized system is the fact that, the audius platform has completely erased everything relating to a third party, it now connects musicians directly to their fans, unlike the central system, where fans are connected to the label before they can get to the artist himself.

• Another proof to be considered is the duration taken for a successful upload of a music.

In the central system, the release of a new hit usually take some time as it would pass through different phases of people and different price tags on the song, but in the audius platform, it takes a little time to upload a successful composed song and it cost nothing.

• In addition to the above explained reasons, the feature of the platform that enables artist to stake and earn is something that can only be done by a Decentralized system.

This Participation is for those holding the audio token.

Shall we proceed please to the next phase of our assignment;

In the audius platform, there exist two types of staking operation, they are :

• Staking delegation
• Operator staking

The staking delegation form of staking allows user to delegate tokens to node operators, and then all rewards gained will be evenly distributed to all by the node operators.

The operator staking permits the delegation of a minimum of 200000 audio tokens, and this is a very high price.
For this reason users prefer making use of staking delegation.

Shall we proceed to the steps taken to stake tokens.

Before any token can be delegated, the first thing one has to do is to connect one's metamask with the platform, to do so please click here and you will be directed to the audius platform.

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I then clicked on tokens and the below image displayed, of which I clicked on explore dashboard and i then clicked on connect metamask.

After I clicked on connect metamask, a different display appeared of which I proceeded to connect the my metamask

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And I finally revisited the dashboard, and I saw clearly that the metamask has been successfully connect, here's a proof

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Now shall we proceed to the main business, which is the delegation of tokens.

To perform node operator staking on the platform is the same as registering as a node operator, below are needed steps;

• The first step to take is to visit the audius platform and then click on services and then click on register new service

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• The next step is for you to choose either to do a discovery node staking or a content node staking, then you will click on register service icon below.

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As you can see, the minimum amount for delegation is 200000 audio tokens and 7000000 as the highest.

• Then click on confirm with metamask and if you qualify, then your tokens will be delegated.

• Now, inorder to perform the staking delegation, you visit the audius dashboard and click on services, then you will scroll downwards to see the list of top operators

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• Then click on any operator of your choice

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• Then click on the delegate icon that is seen on the top left hand and then a display will appear, requesting you to input the number of tokens you want to delegate.

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• Then, you will confirm the transaction with your metamask by clicking on confirm with metamask

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As seen, my transaction was not approved because of insufficient funds to fund the transaction.

Having considered this, join me please as we examine the next task.

Inorder for me to perform this task, I visited the already downloaded audius application on my phone

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• After I launched the app, a display showed, requesting me to sign up, I did this my imputing my Gmail

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• I then proceeded to create a strong password that I can easily remember

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• A display then pop-up, asking me to link my social media accounts of which I declined and decided to update my profile myself

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• Then I was requested to follow at least three artists and then create my display name, of which I did

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Then I saw another display telling me that my account is almost ready, so I waited for some time and it was successful created

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Shall we proceed to the next task of the week

On the audius platform, there are numerous platform to be explored and I believe that we will all enjoy it.

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Please join us as we begin;

• The first feature I will love to explain is the last feature on the roll as seen above

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The first feature I choose to explore Is the user profile feature.
This feature gives information on the owner of an account.

On the profile page Alone, there are very interesting icons to be explored.
As seen above, there's room to upload one's profile picture for easy identification.

On the profile page, we also have the playlists, circled with orange, the playlists help to show the number of musics uploaded by the user.
The profile page also possesses the following and follower icon.

The follower icon shows the number of users a user has followed and the following icon shows the number of persons following a user

On the right hand side of the profile page, we can see the "edit profile" icon, and this helps to edit names, edit backgrounds, update biography and many more.

We also have the icon named "upload track", this icon is important when one wants to upload a musical content.
The repost section shows all repost done by the user.

• The next feature I will love to explore is the "favourite" feature.

This features shows the favourite album, playlists and artist of a user.

As we can see above, I have no favorite playlists nor any of them .

• Another feature to explore is the feature labelled explore

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This feature has four sub icons , "for you", "moods","playlists", "artist".

The content under the "for you" drop down consist of all contents graded because of the user's likes, follow a d reposts.

The icon labelled moods helps to provide a track that suits the current mood of the user, and most times it can be used to Cheer up the user.

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The playlists icon displays a list of featured album, there a user can easily pick the one of his choice

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The artist icon displays a list of featured artist, and a user can easily select their favorite artist and listoto him.

Another feature for exploration is the"your feed" icon, here, all songs uploaded on the platform is easily seen.

Shall we proceed to the next task of the week

The mechanism of the uploading music on audius is not a difficult task.

The first thing to note is that there are two nodes responsible for the security and mechanism for uploading a track; they are the content node and the discovery node.

The content node is responsible for the collection and validation of data.
It is the first node to begin work immediately after a track has been uploaded.

The content node then transfers data to the discovery node.

The discovery node assist to record data and link them to their original uploaders, by this method, protecting your one's work from copyright.

In a nutshell, the discovery and content node work alongside each other to ensure a successful upload.

Shall we proceed to the last section of the day

To to this, I went to my profile and I clicked on upload track and the below appeared

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I then clicked on browse to upload and the below appeared

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I then clicked on continue, to enable me continue the upload

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I then did the necessary, by imputing all they required and I proceeded my upload and finally the music was uploaded

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Indeed the audius platform is the most unique of its kind.
It happens to be the first Decentralized system to partner with tiktok.

And the first that enables artist to gain 90% of their earnings.

I thank Professor @wahyunahrul for this lecture, I look forward to learning from you again.