Topic: [ANN] ♬ Opus - Beta-Ready Decentralized Music Sharing; Running on IPFS and ETH ♬ - page 96. (Read 108610 times)

I played a little bit around with the demo -  looks good.

Will Opus token be listed on any Exchange soon/ever?

Whats the problem in Website?  i can't access it.

Hopefully many investors are interested to buy some tokens here, and music in my opinion is something interesting to follow the development

I have joined the signature campaign and I have invested them In order to have more profit, we are willing to support the music project. I like their projects。

I will invest as much as I can afford.Hope everything goes well.thanks.

This business model seems hardly viable to me.
Firstly, you seem to try taking shares from Deezer and Spotify. I think it's an error : the public going to those platform is interested in listening a LOT of music unlimitedly. A vast majority of this public is incompatible with what you are trying to accomplish.
The target of your platform (as state in your whitepaper) is more focus on pure artist' fans, which is far more restrictive and have a smaller public (= less money flowing).
I agree that, in your configuration, a pay per play seems totally unfeasible, considering that the gas price for a single Ethereum transaction is 2-3$. But is it even viable for song purchase, which are I guess (I never buy songs), somewhere near 1$ each ? If you need to pay 3$ for a 1$ song, it's not viable neither.

So I came with a potential solution. I mean, I'm also a dev (never dealt with blockchain though), I know that what I will say seem simple but is really not that simple in practice. Why wouldn't you create your own chain ? This chain will have 0 fees, allowing both pay per play and buying song. Miners could be rewarded with Opus coins, which would allow them to either sell them or use them to listen music. We could even imagine the mining software integrated in the player. Those who mine would get free listening. Now come the question of blockchain size and number of tx/s. It would be huge, that's right, but there are solutions currently being developed, eg, by Vitalik (https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/, https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ).
With this chain, no need of Ethereum anymore and those high fees. You'll still need of IPFS though, but as you said, fees are low.

Sure, we can answer them here. It will benefit that more people can see it and get clarification.

1) Yes we are a streaming service and also not. We are streaming in the sense that when fans are listening through our Core players, the music files are decrypted and streamed on the fly Songs do not need to be pre-downloaded. Now, we are not a streaming service in the sense that users need to pay for songs only once and upfront. It's useful to note here that Amateur artists can set a low price such that songs can essentially be "streamed"

2) The reason we did not go for a (Pay 0.001$ per play) is because we are a development team focusing primarily on existing and technologically feasible solutions. There simple isn't a system (even if Ethereum reaches serenity with raiden, sharding, LX etc...) that can handle tens of millions of microtransfers per minute with close to 0 fees. It's easy to advertise this but when you look at decentralized technologies it's simply not feasible technologically at this moment.

3) Hence you are free to use 3rd party players that may not be fully legitimately developed. I like to point to the PirateBay in this instance with less and less users by the day. History has shown time and time again that users will prefer to pay a small amount to use a legitimate service that supports artists than try to use a un-reliable player that serves illigetimate music. Ofcourse Law enforcement will also limit the success of non-legitimate players. Us removing infringing tracks isn't censorship it's basic intellectual rights. If we for instance censor songs we don't like then 3rd party players can legitimate offer those tracks and attract our "core player" fans.

And thanks again for asking these questions on behalf of others

Yes I did and what happened all ICO is cheaper to buy from exchanges as the value will be the same as it was in the ICO but then the Team will sell their coins to make profit and make lots of money for their own pockets, Same old story, I have been here for more than 4 years and this is what will happen, want to bet?

Why based on ETH?

Sorry I missed it !
It doesn't fully answer my questions though. See them below.

The question leads to understand you are a streaming service. However, the main goal of streaming is that it is temporal. From what I understand, you are not a streaming service but a music marketplace. As stated below, it is rather permanent

If we can't pay for a subscription plan, then is there a possibility we pay for some kind of temporal access to the song ? (eg, 0.001$ for a one time listening) ?

Ouch. This seems so much like censorship isn't it ? I mean, firstly, comparing to Youtube, who is censoring MANY videos & artist was the worst idea ever  
Then, again, what tell me you are not censoring some music ? Everything can't be decentralized I agree. And this part is not decentralized (simply because it cant). In this case, I'm not sure the world uncensorable is right. While I'm not saying your team might delete tracks on purpose because they don't like it, you might receive threat sooner or later !

Disagree, slack is too rough. It is also only temporal and has no real way to search for things through. I find it better to discuss problems & solutions publicly so that everybody can benefit from it.

Sorry I missed it !
It doesn't fully answer my questions though. See them below.

The question leads to understand you are a streaming service. However, the main goal of streaming is that it is temporal. From what I understand, you are not a streaming service but a music marketplace. As stated below, it is rather permanent

If we can't pay for a subscription plan, then is there a possibility we pay for some kind of temporal access to the song ? (eg, 0.001$ for a one time listening) ?

Ouch. This seems so much like censorship isn't it ? I mean, firstly, comparing to Youtube, who is censoring MANY videos & artist was the worst idea ever  
Then, again, what tell me you are not censoring some music ? Everything can't be decentralized I agree. And this part is not decentralized (simply because it cant). In this case, I'm not sure the world uncensorable is right. While I'm not saying your team might delete tracks on purpose because they don't like it, you might receive threat sooner or later !

Disagree, slack is too rough. It is also only temporal and has no real way to search for things through. I find it better to discuss problems & solutions publicly so that everybody can benefit from it.

First there is a Q&A. It is in the Navbar of the website. Most of these questions are answered there.

What makes Opus different from central streaming services?

Once you purchase the decryption keys to Opus tracks, they will be yours permanently on the decentralized IPFS no matter where you are in the world.

Regarding the verification system I will paste the answer here.

Hope it cleared up some doubts, for more questions do ask the Devs on slack!

Despite the fact that I wear the signature, I have many doubt about this project.

We got Bitcoin & Ethereum. IPFS is simply just the next big thing and thus, seeing that this project is use both IPFS & Ethereum is a good point.

I've been reading the whitepaper really fast, it might be possible that I missed the point. It is also possible that you already answer the question (a basic Q&A could be good, there are always too much gerbish comments on announcements thread to read everything). Do not hesitate to point me out to somewhere that have the answer instead of losing your time repeating things  


You are comparing your service to Spotify and Deezer which are streaming platforms. Both allow us to :

- Listen music for free (no subscription plan), even if they pay for, because adds are giving enough income.
- Listen music without adds or limit with a pay subscription plan.

I may have badly understand Opus, but it doesn't seems like it is a streaming platform and doesn't allow any of the 2 points above. But then, why would you compare to Spotify & Deezer ? If it is not a streaming platform, how is it different from some kind of decentralized marketplace we already have ?
Do we have to pay for each song we would like to listen ? (big deal) Can we download and listen music offline ? (this one isn't a big deal because in ~ 10 years, we'll all have unlimited data and network everywhere).


Your are speaking about 0 censorship. I don't understand. Is there a team at Opus who will valid songs ?
Let's study a case with the lovely Taylor Swift. Let's say she releases a new song :

- Spotify :
She connects to her account who has been validated by Spotify team. She had to provide documents proving she is Taylor Switf while registering her account.
She sends her song to Spotify and negotiate a price per 10k/listening. Spotify release the song.
If someone other than Taylor Switf try to send Taylor Swift song, it will not get accepted because the guys doesn't have the right on it.

- Opus :
Does the artist have to provide proof of ownership on the song ? How do you protect artist from stealing ?
If Opus team is monitoring new songs to protect artist from this, who tell us that you're not censoring others song ?

Also, does an artist have to pay for uploading one song ? Because IPFS storage cost some money. If not, who pays for it ? Opus ?

We, at the Opus foundation, frown upon infringing music. As such, we will be removing infringing songs and music from our Core player, just like youtube does. We will not permit copyright infringing content. If we find copyrighted content, we will try our greatest efforts to claim revenue back, if the artist can prove ownership. Unfortunately it is impossible to control what 3rd party players do and they should be advised to remove infringing content as well.

These 3rd party players use APIs to communicate between IPFS and Etherem and are not endorsed Opus foundation but, like anything blockchain related, they can also use the infrastructure that is running on IPFS and Ethereum. This means that they may be a small risk of rogue players sharing copyright infringing songs. But you should keep in mind that this has nothing to do with Opus foundation. Think (Bittorrent and Piratebay) are nothing related but they use the same infrastructure (P2P)

Ofcourse on the internet there will always be imposters and rogue 3rd party players. And while Piratebay exists, fewer and fewer people use it. The reason is because many people do care about the artist, and want a great experience compared to pirated content on a rogue player that could be shut down at any moment. Think (Napster). Nevertheless, in both situations the Opus network will grow and our budget would increase because the more people use the infrastructure, the great the value of the system. (Drawing parallels to bitcoin in 2013, people were afraid of it's use in crime, yet nowadays people use bitcoin for normal goods because in the end the legitimate service will always win.