Most Influential 2021: Roneil Rumburg

Audius, a music streaming platform based on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, grew from having 500,000 monthly listeners at the end of 2020 to nearly 7 million today, CEO Roneil Rumburg says. That’s significant, and a signal that Audius might emerge as a real challenge to centralized services like Spotify – or at least find its place within the music establishment.

The Complete List: CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2021

Rumburg’s app, especially popular among electronic and dance musicians, takes a novel, token-based approach to the economics of music streaming. But it still has to figure out the best way to get cash in artists’ pockets, Rumburg says.

What was your biggest success in 2021?

Audius grew from ~500,000 monthly listeners at the end of 2020 to nearly 7 million today – representing a 14x jump in usage. Artists on the network nearly tripled to over 200,000 while the content catalog doubled in size to more than 600,000 tracks.

Name one big plan for Audius 2022.

Monetization. :)

How is crypto going to change the world by 2030?

I think everyone in the world, whether they know it or not, will interact with a crypto-powered product on a daily basis.

The Complete List: CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2021