Ray Jacobson, CTO at Audius, joins Unlayered to discuss the decentralized music marketplace and how Audius aims to bring fans and artists closer together. The platform allows for economically incentivized music experiences and leverages blockchain technology to create an open and transparent platform. Spotify’s business model simply doesn’t work for the long tail of artists, and so Audius aims to reduce the distance between artists and fans while allowing a far larger segment of the music industry to make money doing what they love. Audius is an ambitious project which has been in the crypto space for many years, and perhaps now is the time that this project can finally break into the mainstream. - - Time Stamps (0:00) - Ray’s journey into crypto (2:35) - Which problem is Audius solving? (10:05) - Future of AI generated music (13:11) - Fixing music royalties with smart contracts (22:11) - UX is king (24:25) - Obtaining music rights (27:56) - How web 3 improves creator revenues (36:08) - Have music NFTs been a failure? (44:54) - Solfate Podcast Ad (45:22) - Getting Audius streams onto other websites (47:40) - How Audius can compete with Spotify (50:40) - Nurturing Audius-native artists (55:59) - Favourite artists - - Podcast Resources Follow Sal: https://twitter.com/salxyz Follow Dave: https://twitter.com/SolBeachBum Follow Zen : https://twitter.com/ZenLlama Follow Unlayered: https://twitter.com/UnlayeredPod Subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or Google: https://unlayered.io/ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnlayeredPod - - Episode Resources Follow Ray : https://Twitter.com/RaymondJacobson Audius Website : https://Audius.co - - Sponsor Resources Follow Solfate : https://Twitter.com/SolfatePod Solfate Podcast : https://solfate.com/podcast