[PASSED] AUDIO Grants Committee

Proposals
#1

Summary

Provide a group of artists - referred to as the AUDIO Grants Committee (AGC) - 111250 AUDIO to distribute to the Audius community on a case-by-case basis.

The maximum AUDIO per grant request should be soft-capped at 1000 AUDIO, and each member of the grant committee should receive a fixed monthly reward of 250 AUDIO for running the program.

This pilot committee is recommended and selected to kick off the first three-month program as they have a strong reputation for responsible action both within and outside of the Audius community. This allows the pilot program to establish a strong foundation that will allow for a successful transition to community-chosen committee members in future selections.

Abstract

The Audius community treasury currently holds ~19M AUDIO.

This proposal looks to empower and mobilize prominent members of the Audius community by giving them ownership of a pool of AUDIO tokens to be distributed for artist-facing actions like remix contests, live streams, curation and onboarding.

Examples of proposals that may receive a grant from the committee include but are not limited to:

  • 100 AUDIO to be used as prizes for a remix contest
  • 100 AUDIO for curating an ongoing live stream to showcase Audius music
  • 50 AUDIO to curate a community playlist
  • 250 AUDIO to oversee a grassroots onboarding campaign
  • 500 AUDIO to a collective for onboarding all of their artists to Audius.
  • 1000 AUDIO to throw an Audius community festival.

The proposed first allocation of 100k AUDIO is meant to serve as three-month pilot, originally stewarded by:

  • Matthew Chaim
  • Verite
  • Oshi
  • Camoufly
  • Pauline Herr
  • Metsa
  • Chet Porter
  • PLS&TY
  • Pat Lok
  • Teen Daze
  • Houses
  • FRQ NCY

This committee will also feature a veto division from Audius Discord moderators:

  • maxwell
  • galazy
  • Stormwavz

These moderators will be given the power to veto grants proposed from the artist committee on a case by case basis.

Following the completion of the three month trial, the community should assess the sustainability of this program, the signers of this group, and any additional grant amounts.

In exchange for acting as a member of this committee, each of the above 15 members should receive 250 AUDIO per month, estimated to be a total of 3750 AUDIO per month for a total of 11250 AUDIO over the three month trial period.

The committee should be governed using a 7/12 Gnosis Safe multisig found at 0xeABCcd75dA6c021c7553dB4A74CACC958812432A.

This means the allocation of 111250 AUDIO is broken down as 100,000 AUDIO to grants and 11,250 AUDIO to committee members.

Note: Committee members may be further empowered or removed at the discretion of the group based on their level of participation.

Motivation

The community treasury has a deep pool of resources which can be used to mobilize Audius’s top advocates and active artists.

By empowering key actors with a meaningful amount of tokens, we can expect artists to activate more supporters without having to go through on-chain governance for each distribution.

While the community treasury has a large pool of AUDIO, having to present an on-chain proposal to receive any amount of allocation drastically reduces the scope of what can be passed, and who is capable of submitting them in the first place.

This proposal looks to offer an easy onramp to AUDIO rewards as decided by the community, for the community.

Specification

Distribute 111250 AUDIO from the community treasury to the committee multisig found at 0xeABCcd75dA6c021c7553dB4A74CACC958812432A.

The committee is responsible for overseeing the distribution of monthly rewards to members and the ongoing allocation of AUDIO to grants recipients.

Any unused AUDIO that remains at the end of the three month pilot should be returned to the community treasury - but only if the program is not extended after a three month period.

Benefits

  • Provide artists with a more granular way to earn AUDIO for one-off campaigns
  • Empower key contributors to seed the community with AUDIO rewards
  • Create a funnel for creative experiments to be rewarded in real time, without having to go through on-chain governance.

Drawbacks

  • High degree of trust to grant recipients.
  • Multiple committee members are new to overseeing a grants program, and this program poses the first time they have governed a large sum of tokens.
  • Tokens distributed to community grants are not subject to any vesting.

Vote

Please use this poll to soft signal your support of this proposal.

  • Yes - Distribute 111250 AUDIO to the Grants Committee
  • No - Do not distribute AUDIO

0 voters

9 Likes
AUDIO Grants Committee Wave One Recap
#2

Fully in favor of this proposal.

On-chain governance is crucial for true decentralization but also limiting for non-technical users. I’m keen to see how this program can invite wider participation from the Audius community and allow them to take advantage of the AUDIO community treasury in a more nimble fashion.

This list of artists feels like a great group to get it off the ground. Having collected NFTs from a vast number of them, I feel confident that they’re able to navigate things like Gnosis Safe to bring these grants to life!

Would definitely support and help amplify applications however I can!

7 Likes
#3

100% on board with this proposal. Getting the Audius community involved with AUDIO distribution in unique and creative ways is an exciting and fitting use of the Audius platform. I can definitely see this creating more opportunities for artists and help expand the community growth.

As Cooper mentioned, on-chain governance for non-technical users can be limiting, so having a middle ground to promote growth and real time incentive is a great solution.

Couldn’t be happier to have been brought onto this committee with some very talented artists and community members. Looking forward to see this in action!

7 Likes
#4

I like the idea of the proposal. Putting the Community treasury to use and for a good reason - growing the platform and having it more interactive with the users!

I like the ideas for those rewards, would also suggest maybe rewards for social media posts or other Audius related events such as the coingecko one a few weeks back. Not so sure on the reward for collectives - purely because of how that would have to be distributed or if the ‘leader/s’ of a collective would keep it.

Do you have intention of getting through the full 100,000 in the 3 month trial period? Just interested on the scale of this, sounds like it could start off slow but could easily become a big part of Audius. It’s exciting to see it actually going to use and to benefit the whole platform.

I can see this growing into something bigger following the 3 month period, even the drawbacks you list are very minor when compared to the benefits.

A couple questions I do have:

  1. How would the committee oversee things such as remix competitions? Would the person hosting reach out to one, you discuss it and pass it by the discord mods?

  2. Would there be plans to grow the committee in the future if the trial were to be successful? From a user’s perspective, the community has already shown they’re not too fond of Audius focusing rewards on established artists (seeing to the addition of the underground trending chart), would love to see more of the general Audius community involved in something like this. It’s all good having 13 verified, established artists on your committee but I feel the community of crypto-saavy users and also curators could come in useful for more perspectives and ideas. Would definitely recommend diversification of people on the committee as there are some golden community members who would be a great fit.

Overall love the idea and looking forward to seeing how it goes over the 3 months (if it goes through. Hopeful it does!)

Edit: agree with @Sweeppah and @AudiusPlaylists below

8 Likes
#5

Good proposal. +1

Only thing I would change is that committee members (or atleast part of) should be voted by community itself as stated in the beginning of the proposal “community-elected group of artists”. Not hand picked by single entity.

I would suggest this election to be held on Discord or equivalent platform where it is easy to detect fraudulent votes You can see persons message history on Discord to prevent bots from voting.

15 Likes
#6

This proposal is so cool, but I agree with @Sweeppah . The grant members to reward should be chosen by the community itself. I can really see these names already trending on Audius, so they already get rewarded…

5 Likes
#7

Tagging on to the points others have already made, I like the general concept, but I feel that the committee should represent Audius as a whole. Currently, the stewards of this pilot predominantly consist of EDM artists with no representation by artists who make Hip-Hop, Lo-Fi, etc., on the platform.

I believe that without representation by a genre-diverse committee, the allocation of grants may become heavily skewed towards EDM. If this committee wants to empower all curators, it should show that through its membership. Like others have stated, this best solution would probably have to be a community vote before the 3 month period.

Provide a community-elected group of artists

Also, I feel that the committee should not be restricted towards only artists and include curators and other prominent members of the community.

13 Likes
#8

Great proposal and lots of great responses, +1 to each follow up response. The only thing I would add is an $AUDIO rewards program that dips even lower than the Underground Trending Chart. Say ><10$A per genres top trending. For so many producers the Top 5 is so out of reach, and even the top 5 Underground is as well, but top 5 success in a sub genre is easier to reach for. But yes, more distro of $AUDIO is a good thing!

6 Likes
#9

Awesome proposal, and definitely agree with points made above. I feel that as time progresses the committee will morph and change depending on activity, so the concerns regarding the initial selection are definitely valid but can be mitigated. I agree with community representation from the discord & getting artists & curators from various genres. In the future maybe there is a way to elect new members.

Regardless this is such a cool grassroots movement to get more people involved in the Audius ecosystem. Looking forward to seeing how it progresses!

3 Likes
#10

NACK under the current board selection conditions.

The board should be democratically selected by discord users on the audio hodlers discord, and everyone who has the $AUDIOHodlers role should be eligible to vote in a such selection or possibly everyone on the Audius Community server should be eligible to vote.
Same rule set as for voting goes for who can submit theirs candidacy for being part of it.

The idea itself is good, but the board being pre-selected by you, without wider community consensus ISN’T acceptable to me.

If the board selection is changed to be decided democratically, I can support this.

8 Likes
#11

I personally think the members accurately represent the community at large when it comes specifically to the EDM scenes (even though Audius is much more than just EDM, it is clearly one of our strongest segments)

Having the veto division be the discord moderators seems perfect since they are at the forefront of our community on a daily basis as well as extremely active on the platform itself.

Being able to give EVERYONE a chance for grants is something very nice for those who may otherwise struggle to come up with prizes for contests for example.

Highly support this!

8 Likes
#12

I completely agree.
Like a democratic system, power belongs to the community and isn’t it Audius’ very purpose to let the community decide? It can also allow the community to become more involved when it sees that it has a real role to play.

4 Likes
#13

Thanks for the incredible feedback on this all !!

Hearing those concerns and addressed some of those in-line. (See “Summary”)

3 Likes
#14

The new edit has cleared up some confusions we had and the new detail in that paragraph is good to know. Appreciate it!

7 Likes
#15

Agree with the proposal’s general intention, but also agree with some of the comments above around allowing the community to vote on the committee members. This could be an excellent way to encourage additional use of the Audius platform which benefits all of us.

5 Likes
#16

I definitely think this is a great use of the community treasury, and I am excited to see what is going to happen next. I definitely would love to see how I can get involved as a community member of Audius as well. I also agree with some of the other people that mentioned that the committee members should be voted on within the community and that there should be more of a genre variety between the committee members so we can push more of our community (basically non-EDM people) to get involved! Love this idea so far, and I hope there are more to come.

6 Likes
#17

Pretty nice of the proposal. I like the idea. I will give a little, because I have very few tokens :frowning: :pleading_face:

2 Likes
#18

I am in favor, however the drawbacks are not without acknowledgement. I definitely agree that redistribution of audio to empty or small pockets will be a good way to incentivize more active participation on the platform. I believe community events are key to on-boarding artists big and small.
I think the moderators are an excellent source of executive action such as vetos but then it does beg the question of moderation (in moderation). If more moderators are added, will they be part of that veto division?
Considering everything I am for this proposal to help grow audius in the next 3 months.

3 Likes
#19

Appreciate everyone hopping in with great commentary on this.

What I’m seeing is a clear request for open governance around the formation of new committees moving forward. This makes perfect sense and is definitely a precedent to be set moving forward. Thanks to @matthewchaim for clarifying how this genesis committee was elected in the summary!

To add on to a couple other points:

Makes perfect sense. The cool part about this committee is it should be genre agnostic. A bass producer requesting 100 AUDIO for a remix contest should theoretically be treated no different than a country act requesting 100 AUDIO for a similar campaign. With that said, having a more diverse group of members in the future will definitely help spread the word and invite more broad participation. Excited to see how new members are added during the pilot and to keep this in mind for the renewal of the program in a few months time!

Couldn’t agree more - I see community events being one of the primary ways AUDIO is allocated from the Grant Committee. Stoked to see what you have in mind here!

The way this reads, I would assume not all moderators will have veto power on the committee. IMO the veto should very rarely (if ever) need to be used - thus meaning it’s more of a safeguard than something that needs to actively be maintained and grow in size. I would be comfortable for the three nominated moderators being locked in as those with veto power for the pilot. I’d go further to suggest that 2 of the 3 mods must be in agreement for a veto to be enacted.

Overall, this proposal has garnered the most governance participation to date! Super exciting!

Something to be aware of is this will need support from a node operator to provide the technical overhead to get this submitted on-chain. Keen to see if someone jumps up to the task :eyes:

6 Likes
#20

One thing i would like to add. There needs to be some transparency to this. If the committee members are not voted by community the audio grants need to be transparent. Meaning: Everyone needs to be able to check who received a grant, how much and why.

So my suggestion is:
Make a open list that anyone can read about the receivers of Audio grants, how much and reason.

If there are privacy concerns, i suggest people can always turn down a grant. Otherwise this seems to be more like cool kids private club rather than something that should be community driven. Still liking the proposal a lot and not trying to diss any committee members. I think they are all pretty cool bunch of people. Trying to focus my critique on the proposal, not the people. Thank you.

8 Likes