Opus - The world's first decentralised music platform

The problem

The music industry is broken. Streaming platforms such as Spotify, Deezer , and Apple Music take up to 80% of artist’s revenue, and while larger artists can accept it, small artists are often unable to make a living from music streaming. Read more.

Music fans also have a terrible experience. With streaming services competing for exclusive deals and fragmenting the music industry, fans often have to struggle between numerous different platforms just to listen to their favorite artists. Read more.

Playlist makers are also not compensated at all for the hard work they put into creating well-crafted playlists that, experts say, drives most of the growth in the online streaming industry.

Our solution at Opus

What we have developed is a beta-ready, 4 layer decentralized system that uses cutting edge low latency IPFS as a storage layer to store songs permanently and transparently. A Ethereum-based logic layer to handle all the transactions on the Opus network. A Universal Music Registry Number (UMRN) relay to keep track of a global ledger of music tracks, and last but not least an Opus-API that enables any player, including the core player to access the Opus Infrastructure and play music tracks all around the world. With such a immutable system in place, we then introduce additional mechanisms such as the OpusDAO, and the artist bounty system.

We targeted the root cause: Monopolized and Centralized platforms. Imagine a world where your music travels with you no matter what music player you choose and where the music tracks you buy are available forever, whenever, wherever. Well you need to imagine no further, our blockchain-based beta is ready and you can try it now today!

Technology

At Opus, we believe in developing scalable and stable infrastructure. To this end, we have developed a novel 4 layer solution that drives the Opus protocol stack.

• Application layer: This is the top layer where the Opus API interacts with various 3rd party players to decode and deliver music tracks.
• Logic layer: This layer, is a system of smart contracts running on the Ethereum blockchain. On this layer, resides the user contract which stores each user’s decryption keys, reference file hashes to the IPFS storage, and the business logic that handles transactions.
• Directory layer: While each track has it's permanent IPFS hash, the directory layer is a JSON database that stores all the Hashes of tracks available on the Opus network.
• Storage layer: Due to gas constraints, we store all the tracks on the IPFS network. This ensures that songs are available permanently, decentrally and with low latency.