# Bringing an Open Music Protocol into The Real World: Onboarding Millions | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 07:22
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-MbjUqblMpsY
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbjUqblMpsY

## Description

Every month Audius serves millions of artists & fans and hundreds of millions of API requests while growing a fully-decentralized and fully-licensed open music protocol. This talk is about how we achieve real world usage where most users are non-crypto native in a complex industry full of legacy software systems, red tape, and multi-party complexity. It boils down to simplicity, choosing the right tech at the right time, and uniting Web2 and Web3 philosophies.

Speaker(s): Ray Jacobson
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Real World Ethereum
Keywords: Sufficient decentralization, Product-market fit, User Experience, adoption, mass

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] [Music] he asked me for a fun fact I really do like mango sticky rice it's awesome um anyway hey I'm Ray uh my talk is called on boarding Millions if you were just here for Dave's talk this is going to be a very different vibe but we're going to get down to Brass tax and we're going to talk about how we onboard people into the web 3 ecosystem my name is Ray I'm the CTO at TI Labs which is one of the contributors to the audius protocol is this on different slides oh we went too far okay I all right I would assume that most people here have seen these words written before I certainly have the internet certainly has and I think candidly the jury is a little bit out still on like what actually is the killer use case for crypto and this is my personal favorite I'll leave it on the slide for a second if you want to read it so I think that crypto can probably be all of these things but we really need to focus on consumer and we need to do it in a way that we really haven't been so far so my presentation today I want to talk to you in a few minutes about some of the pretty hot takes I have about the ecosystem and things that everyone who's in the consumer space really should be thinking about before I get into that a little bit of background on what audius is uh just so you know that you can take my words to have some amount of weight audius is a decentralized music streaming service that's governed and operated by its Community web3 Music platform why are we doing this we want to help artists and rights holders of Music control their Destiny online and how do we do this we're providing Direct access between artists labels and their fans with really deep engagement tools and monetization tools to make it happen at a quick glance these are some of the stats really excited every time I show this slide uh because a lot of these numbers are really big and I think there's some weight to some of the things that I'm going to share about how we've gotten to this point so hot take number one I'm not going to spend a ton of time here let's call them apps the term D app is meaningless out there most people in the world are still using phones and browsers I assume most people here are doing that until we have some radical new hardware we should not be using terms that alienate web 2 users let's call them apps number two emails are amazing and I think we should try really hard to not reinvent things that we don't have to reinvent we have so many hard problems to solve as this industry but I think decentralized identity is not actually one of them that we need to spend that much more time on this is our biggest competitor probably have seen this logo before for this is their signup form it has one input field pretty much universally across the world anyone who's using a computer knows what to do here this is what we seem to have adopted and if I'm a web 2 user and I look at this I have no idea what I'm looking at I don't know what any of these words mean I don't know what any of these logos are and this is almost dead in the water from day one what I'm proposing in this hot take is that emails are decentralized identity with billions of users and can be used to make really great web 3 native onboarding and there are a lot of products out there that do this really well we have our own home worlded one there are many people at this conference who are building things like this so you can make something like this and this is we've spent a lot of time trying to make our on booing process as familiar as possible number three sometimes Fiat is okay we should settle in crypto we should let people custody their funds we should provide sometimes Fiat ux show balances in Fiat where we can we are in a transitionary period is an industry and we should meet users where they're at so here's a quick case study from aias this is an artist named ko ko on the track is what he goes by he ran this remix competition on audius where he listed things you can see here it's in dollars and cents $49.99 he made $30,000 in Revenue in two weeks and not a single person who purchased this track was web 3 native but behind the scenes everything was settled in usdc and the thing that I want to articulate here is that we can still get all of the perks of programmable money without users even knowing that they're on crypto and that is an Incredible use case for us number four we should stop teaching users unnecessary things our users don't give a if we are an L1 L2 app chain Kaa postgress like whatever it is make the right technical decision weighing all of these things but make a decision where you can build ux that doesn't have to explain this to your users at all these are really important problems we should be solving but they're not marketing copy and if your signup flow has a user pick a chain you're starting off on the wrong foot number number five and my last one because I think my lightning talk is almost over we should lean on some of the financial tools that we can that other people can't we can do a lot more in web 3 than in web 2 because of the way we can do Capital formation the way that web 2 users already expect many things to be free we can put that on steroids and give all sorts of access that other people cannot do this whole concept of the infinite Garden um so really you know my pitch to you is that you know if we're going to onboard millions of users we should build the best products forgetting about web 2 web 3 whatever build the best products we have some of the strongest minds and Technical people in all of Technology here if you're if you're in oh my emoji didn't go but if you're if you're in consumer your target audience is not here today and we should really really internalize that and think deeply about it um thank you I'll take Q&A and uh if you are interested in talking about this more please seek me out after uh we also are running a event on Thursday if you like music and you want to talk to like-minded people too thanks awesome Ray thank you so much we have space for one question who's going to be the lucky one there hi my name is Nefertiti um I was signed to Universal for like too long and I'm wondering what's your motivation if you're not like rooted in music to create this type of platform for musicians uh rooted in music is my personal background or just in general why do people like you make these types of I want to go against Spotify totally yeah um you know I mean there's there's many stories we have of people that we've worked with who have like yourself signed deals sometimes that don't favor them and and ultimately we want to give people the opportunity to choose I myself am a musician I grew up playing piano from a young age played in a rock band in high school never pursued music full-time because I ended up liking software more but I think the creative space is one of the like ripe fruits to pick in this new wave of technology where there can be a lot of impact on ownership and I think that's like the the perfect marriage with something like music um would love to talk talk more though and a few folks from our team are here as well okay thank you so much please give an Applause to Ray appreciate that man thank you not there thank you so much so