San Francisco-based start-up Audius has raised $8,6m from Silicon Valley investors for a blockchain-based digital streaming network that connects fans directly with artists and exclusive new releases, Music Business Worldwide reports. The platform aims to allow artists to set the rate for their own work and capitalise on data that shows them who their superfans are. Audius will keep 10% of revenue and the rightsholder will keep 90%. Audius launched in 2019, it has reached 1.3m users listening every month, over 50k people have uploaded content, and the platform hosts around 200k tracks.

The current average per-stream rate for artists across Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer is around £0.004, but there are several streaming startups offering more generous propositions. Guardian presents three of them: pay-as-you-go platform SonStream charges listeners around 3.3p per play of a track, with 2.5p going directly to the rights holder; Berlin-based co-operative Resonate is pioneering a “stream-to-own” model - it charges listeners for the first nine plays of one song, the cost amounting to the average price of a download, and after that, users own the track and have unlimited plays; Audius in San Francisco is developing a system that allows artists to set a per-stream rate or monthly subscription - 10% would go to the Audius network, and the rights holder would keep the rest.

On Monday SoundCloud announced they will be setting up a free upload limit to 15 tracks. On Thursday they abandoned the idea. But the damage was done. Twitter pushed its “decentralized and open-source” streaming service Audius (free, unlimited upload) in the meantime, and another competing service Audiomack started s new ad campaign - "always free, […]