Working Beta? Check, Open-sourced code? Check, Team Background? Check. Learn more about the efforts Opus has made to decentralize the music industry.
Opus is the world’s first fully decentralized music sharing platform that aims to tackle the $40 Billion industry issue of music sharing at a protocol and infrastructure level.
“I’m disappointed with how musicians are treated nowadays in the music industry, that is exactly why I decided to invest in the Opus foundation” – COO Mateusz Mach
Mega-corporate music streaming services such as Spotify and Youtube pay peanuts to artists. On youtube for instance, artists need to have at least 4.2M fans to even afford living at minimum
wage. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/03/how-much-musicians-make-spotify-itunes-youtube) Opus breathes new live into this industry by cutting out all the middleman. On Opus, artists can list their songs at any price they feel is comfortable and rest assured that they will receive all of the revenue, now and forever.
Opus is an infrastructure level solutions that uses IPFS as a storage layer for music and Ethereum as a logic/transfer layer. Such a system, according to Opus, enables rapid scalability and significantly reduced gas costs. The Opus team, consisting mostly of Developers and tech-minded people, has already built the basis of such a system. There is a Public Beta that you can try on their website (http://bit.ly/opusmusic123)
“While there are some music-related blockchain solutions, none of them have a working Beta that demonstrates blockchain based music-sharing, or a solid business plan that can capture the mainstream music listener.” – CTO Chenhao Xu
Opus is starting a crowdsale in order to raise funds to continue development and implement additional feature such as a DAO and Artist bounty system within the blockchain. The presale has already begun and will end sometime around July 22 with an additional crowdsale to follow suit. There is a Hard cap of $20M on this crowdsale ($18M due to reduced ETH prices). Part of the funds will be used to further develop the platform (45%), to market and promote it (25%), and to pay for artists (13%) and operations (10%). A small amount will also be used for legal fees (7%).
Opus, from a both a technical and a business perspective, appears to have a strong business plan, working product, and a great team, and It’s a definite crowdsale under the radar for people who are looking for a long-term stake in the crypto scene.
Opus website: http://bit.ly/opusmusic123
