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With a monthly life of 4 million, the Web3.0 app scene is slowly unfolding

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Outside of crypto asset trading, Audius is the first and only Web3.0 application that goes beyond Critical Mass

The translation of sequence

On March 25, Audius, a decentralized music-streaming platform, announced that it had reached 4 million monthly users. Audius exploded from 3 million monthly active users to 4 million in just 22 days, and the protocol token $Audio was valued at more than $400 million (12% circulation rate). It is not an exaggeration to say that Audius is the first and only Web3.0 application outside of crypto asset trading that jumps over Critical Mass into the fast track of "spontaneous" growth. It may not be too long before Audius reaches the magnitude of users and market capitalization comparable to the three major record companies and Tencent Music, and we can even announce the arrival of the era of Web3.0. Because in one important industry, the Web3.0 platform transcends traditional and Web2.0 intermediaries.

Why Audius can ride the dust? I think it comes from the founders and team's deep understanding of both music and cryptographic protocols. Using the Audius application, whether it is the website, mobile APP or desktop APP, the experience is completely Web2.0 style, no private key management, Gas, waiting for transaction confirmation and other troubles. One might wonder: Is this still a Web3.0 app? How to guarantee the security of assets and prevent the platform from doing evil? And so on. I think this is the biggest lesson of Audius for Web3.0 app developers: you have to make good apps in order to get users to accept and enjoy the value of decentralization. In other words, decentralization can be compromised, it can be asymptotic, and the user experience can't be discounted.

In the current crypto market, DEFI and NFT are in the hot seat. But there is no need to dismiss or dismiss other areas of Web3.0. Social, games, DAO, advertising, IoT, creator economy (music, video, blogs, novels)... Web3.0 has so many directions to explore that it's time to think about "The Next Big Thing." This article is written by Rhythm Blockbeats according to Audius founder Roneil Rumburg inAn interview for the Open Web Collective podcastListen to the translation, and use the third person narrative. Recommended for friends in the Chinese crypto community to read.

-- Liu Yi, Founder of Octopus Network

Getting acquainted with the crypto world

Roneil first heard about Bitcoin and blockchain on the Stanford campus. A group of people on campus are talking about what technology can give people back their lost energy and freedom.

At that time, Roneil was still a computer science major, and since his studies were closely related to blockchain, it gave him a perfect opportunity to explore this technology in depth. Roneil and Forrest, his partner at Audius, then started mining, and in 2013, he used the money he made to start Backslash, a cryptocurrency money transfer tool.

Roneil subsequently became involved in a number of venture capital investments in the crypto space. But the final decision was to go back to product building.

Roneil and Forrest have been thinking about the idea of Audius for four or five years. They have always wanted to build a platform with community operation and decentralization, and artists cannot tamper with the original rules once they have finished their works. Finally, in 2017, they decided that the lowest level of infrastructure was enough to support the applications they wanted to build. This time they don't have to build another blockchain, or another storage system.

If you had to rebuild these systems, it would be difficult for a team of 12 people. As both Roneil and Forrest are big fans of electronic music, they see a lot of problems with the existing platforms, where the discriminatory treatment of different artists and the unfair treatment of the long tail artists have led to the disappearance of their favorite artists. Roneil and Forrest are deeply distressed.

Start preparing Audius

In mid-2018, Roneil and Forrest founded Audius. Before raising money, they first made a POC (proof-of-concept) version of Audius to convince themselves that everything they had in mind was sound and mature, and that this kind of peer-to-peer streaming over IPFS no longer required an extremely long wait.

It was very difficult to build a decentralized product without upfront funding, but they did it. After completing the POC, they started raising money and building a team.

In 2019, the first version of Audius began to market, and then started to communicate with various artists to get them to register Audius platform. For soliciting artists, although it can be accomplished by conqueringnegotiated head artists one by one, it is too inefficient. Audius needs a method to recruit artists in batch, especially long-tail artists.

So Audius decided to focus on the community, and continue to do market work in the community, which is how Audius got the first users. They were impressed by the 20 to 30 percent conversion rate of their "cold mail" campaign, but they were also frustrated by the problems caused by the user explosion. In the early days, Roneil and Forrest had technical backgrounds, but most of their experience was in the campaign and the technical engineering work was left to the rest of the team.

Audius Financing Road

Audius raised money two months after Ethereum hit a new high. At that time, the whole Silicon Valley was looking for crypto projects. The whole financing process was very smooth and efficient, and it only took about a week to raise $5.5 million.

Of course, Roneil and Forrest's experience in the venture capital world and their connections helped them find the right funding. Today, Audius has 100,000 users who listen to music every month, and more than 40,000 songs have been shared on the platform.

Audius now cares most about the participation of artists and their feelings, because if artists think that the platform cares about them, they will be more willing to share their works on this platform, and more works will get more users for Audius.

But for decentralized applications, a major drawback is that the platform will encounter problems and need to be updated and iterated.

Since the platform is run by decentralized nodes, delays in solving problems add up. A solution to this problem requires taking advantage of the token incentives of cryptoeconomics in the protocol, such as the use of forfeiture, where a minority of pledged tokens will be forfeited over a period of time if the majority of nodes update and a minority of nodes do not update.

What made Roneil most happy was that the artists he had been following and loving for years discovered Audius and published their work on the platform. When artists start publishing on Audius, they will spread their works through their social media channels, which will let more fans and artists know about Audius, thus forming a positive cycle of growth.

Let more people understand and enter the crypto world

If users want to accept blockchain technology and crypto assets, the most important thing is to let them feel the benefits of decentralized products, as long as they do not break the user-product interaction paradigm.

For example, when you want to interact with a music streaming app, you probably don't need to have any programming background. This is not the case in today's crypto world. On the positive side, interoperability in the crypto world leads to amazing apps like Defi, but on the negative side, users are forced to interact only with products of the same paradigm.

A fitting metaphor is that ask users to hand over their wallets in their pockets and they may agree, but ask them to hand over their bank passwords and they will surely refuse. But now in the crypto world, when you interact with any app, you need to provide information about your bank password, and the user has no choice. However, different applications need different information from the user.

Therefore, the usability problem of the application needs to be solved according to different scenarios of different applications. There will not be a one-size-fits-all solution to solve the usability problem.

A good product team will be able to improve the usability of products based on the needs of different products. For the application of Audius which pays great attention to the client end, what we need to do is to let the user enjoy the advantages of decentralized application under the condition of no perception of the user. When pitching, the team should not pitch decentralized technology as a highlight, and encryption should only be an option in the product technology stack. Users care more about what the product can do for them than how it's built.

The future of the community operating platform

Roneil himself was very interested in music. He found the pain point in the music field, so he decided to make a product cut from the music field.

However, there is demand in other areas as well, especially in areas where the demand for communication is extremely high.

People rely on platforms for distribution, like Twitter and Facebook. Roneil believes that platforms should belong to the people who provide value to them. Now the user is the platform's product, and the platform sells the user as a product to advertisers, which means that the interests of the platform and the interests of the user can never be aligned.

But the crypto economy can use economic incentives to align the interests of the platform with those of the user, like Audius, where the platform is controlled by the community. At the same time, lack of permission and other second-order advantages such as transparency prevent platforms from "pulling blankets" (forcibly removing resources) and changing rules, which is critical for market-based platforms (like Uber and Airbnb) that connect merchants with consumers.

But some would argue that such a multilateral platform would be extremely expensive to set up, and that it would be even more difficult to create a link between supply and demand from scratch if the platform had no control.

In Roneil's opinion, although bazaar-based platforms in the music field are slightly different from other platforms, he believes that there are different ways to start cold demand and supply, and to align the interests of both sides. The platform uses tokens to transfer and distribute value is a good way.

For example, when an Uber driver completes the first 100 trips on the platform, he contributes value such as driver mobility to the Uber network, but legal restrictions prevent Uber from granting these drivers Uber equity, and Uber's operating model cannot be like this. But in the crypto world, platforms can create new and better business models, and platforms can forge new value carriers to help market expansion without having to spend too much money on market growth. Tokens have a very counter-intuitive mechanism, and the more users the token is distributed, the more value it generates for the underlying platform. The value of the platform grows in line with the value captured by users' tokens, thus ensuring that the platform's interests are aligned with those of users, thus saving a lot of expenses needed for user growth.

Web2 vs. Web3 worlds

Regarding the low rate of new blood flow and the lack of diversity in the crypto industry, Roneil believes that the main problem lies in the crypto community's lack of tolerance for new users. What the community needs to do is to convey the core ideas to the new people and teach them patience.

Web3 natives can actually learn a lot from people in the Web2 space professionally. So Audius tends to hire people who have worked in the Web2 world. Web3 enterprises should take advantage of the Web2 ecosystem, rather than assume that Web3 is a new paradigm and that they need to throw away all the patterns of the Web2 world, which is quite misleading. In particular, Web2's community-building model is desirable.

Finally, Roneil shared the recent activities that Audius has been carrying out in the community. Audius regularly hosts competitions for music producers, and judges from the music industry are invited. Discord is the most intensive gathering point of the Audius community. Over 2000 artists will share their experiences and discuss cooperation on Discord Channel.