Audius Launches Solana Token Airdrop for Artists as Music Streams Top 250 Million

Audius, a crypto-powered music streaming service, has announced a season of airdrops and rewards that will see 30 million AUDIO tokens handed out—valued at over $3 million—to users of the platform. The campaign was launched in celebration of Audius surpassing an all-time milestone of 250 million on-chain song streams from users.

The first season of AUDIO rewards kicks off with 2 million AUDIO tokens being airdropped to contributing artists in what is branded as the “Artist Appreciation Airdrop.” Token allocations are determined by an artist’s streams, sales, revenue, followers, and other factors. A total of 1,174 artists are eligible for the drop.

But this is just the beginning of a wider season of weekly rewards—which will also include listeners alongside artists.

"Artists have always been the motivation behind everything we do at Audius," CEO Roneil Rumburg said in a statement. "From day one, our vision was to become the backbone of a new music industry. With over 250 million on-chain streams now under our belt, we see it as a huge indicator that the market readiness for payments and rewards have finally arrived.”

Through its history, Audius has streamed music made by Skrillex, Deadmau5, Disclosure, and other prominent artists. Last September, the music platform rolled out its new “artist monetization program” which allows artists to freely set their own terms and pricing when listing downloadable “premium tracks” for sale. Plus, 10% of each payment is now allocated to the community treasury. 

While its on-chain governance and backend is built on top of Ethereum, its monetization is built on Solana—which the company says has allowed it to scale to 250 million on-chain streams. As such, the season of airdrop and rewards will take place on Solana.

This airdrop campaign is the first since 2020, when the project first hit mainnet, and the second in its entire history. Audius isn’t looking to repeat the past, however. Instead, the company is expected to carry out further weekly airdrops which will include challenges that the entire ecosystem can take part in.

Through Season 1, which is expected to take a few months to complete, 30 million AUDIO tokens are set to be distributed as rewards—working out to 3% of its 1.5 billion token supply. After that, the project will consider a second season of rewards, but this has yet to be set in stone.

Edited by Andrew Hayward