Audius, a decentralized music streaming service, announced a major partnership with video-sharing app TikTok on Monday, allowing its artists to upload their music to TikTok to be used in videos. With the first-of-its-kind feature, artists on Audius will be able to easily make their songs available for TikTok users to include in their videos. Artists will also be able to link their following on TikTok back into Audius.
“Any artist can take a song they already have on Audius and just export it over to TikTok in one click,” Forrest Browning, co-founder and chief product officer of Audius, told Rolling Stone. “A common way that unsigned artists get their stuff up there right now is by holding their phone up to a laptop while it plays their song, and they add it as background music. It’s not great.”
There are more than 100,000 artists on Audius, including well-known names like Skrillex, Weezer, deadmau5, Diplo and Odesza. There are also many new artists on the platform, who may garner more exposure through the TikTok partnership.
This is not only a massive deal for Audius, which was founded in 2018 and just surpassed 5 million monthly active users in August, but also for the entire crypto community. It paves the way for potentially more mainstream adoption of blockchain-based companies. Unlike Spotify or SoundCloud, which are not blockchain-based, Audius is built on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains and is run by a community of token holders, rather than one centralized entity.
To become a token holder, users can either buy AUDIO, the native governance token of Audius, or earn it. Top artists and active users may earn AUDIO tokens as rewards, for example. Token holders can vote on and have control over decisions made, similar to shareholders who own certain stocks.
After the partnership with TikTok was announced, the price of AUDIO surged. In 24 hours, the price nearly doubled, according to CoinMarketCap, and its market value surpassed $1 billion for the first time. Currently, AUDIO is trading at around $2.80.
