Skip to content
Roneil Rumburg edited this page Aug 13, 2019 · 15 revisions

Audius is a decentralized, community-owned and artist-controlled music-sharing protocol. Audius provides a blockchain-based alternative to SoundCloud to help artists publish and monetize their work and distribute it directly to fans.

The mission of the project is to give everyone the freedom to share, monetize, and listen to any audio.

This repository has all the pieces that make and support the audius protocol including smart contracts, services and other libraries.

If you are interested in operating a service, check out our staking resources section. If you're interested in contributing to the Audius protocol, explore the code below!

Audius High-level Architecture

Audius System Architecture

Audius consists of three demographics of users: content creators, listeners, and service providers.

Service providers can provide one or more of the following services by staking Audius tokens and registering their service:

  • Discovery service (host an endpoint with SSL support and register endpoint with stake)
  • Creator node (host an endpoint with SSL support and register endpoint with stake)
  • Content service (host an IPFS service register service with stake) (coming soon!)
  • Arbitration (register yourself as an arbitrator to vote on cases when chosen) (coming soon!)

In the above diagram, creators can either run a creator node themselves or use one of the network-registered creator nodes.

Audius Services

Service Description
creator-node Maintains the availability of users' content on IPFS including user metadata, images, and audio content
discovery-provider Indexes and stores the contents of the audius contracts on the ethereum blockchain for clients to query via an API
identity-service Stores encrypted auth ciphertexts, does Twitter oauth and relays transactions on behalf of users
content-service Monitors Audius activity and intelligently caches content to increase availability

Audius Smart Contracts & Libs

Lib Description
libs An easy interface to the distributed web and audius services: Identity Service, Discovery Provider, Creator Node
contracts The smart contracts being developed for the audius streaming protocol
eth-contracts The ethereum smart contracts being developed for the audius streaming protocol