OPUS — Your questions answered!

We recently announced our OpenAPI Partner Platform that allows other startups to use our API to create their own players. Naturally, this raises many questions, and our community was kind enough to provide us with some excellent questions that will be answered in this Q&A.

Does sharing technology with partners potentially mean that you are creating your own competitors? How are you not competing against yourself if people could use your API and undercut your monthly subscription fee to encourage people to use their player instead of Opus?

Great question! That’s not exactly how our partner platform works. Essentially, we will be receiving a more steady income that will allow us to continue developing the platform in the future in the form of the fees these partners pay. So while, yes, our partners will be using our technology to create their own players, Opus will receive a cut of this income and hedge against the risk of competitors coming in with their own technology, directly competing with us.

While the income might be somewhat lower due to undercutting, we are certain to receive some revenue.

Do these partners pay Opus a portion of their monthly subscription fees that they earned by using your API?

Yes. Opus covers the hosting fees, so our partners pay the minimum price to Opus necessary to ensure that we are not operating at a loss — this is a base price that means Opus will at least break even, and this price will vary depending on the hosting costs. On top of this return, Opus will receive a percentage of the monthly subscription that is generated by the partners — this source of income will make Opus a profit.

If I remember correctly, approximately 70–90% of Opus subscription fees go to artists, will these partners give the same percentage of subscription fees to the artists as well since they are using OpusAPI?

No, unfortunately this is not possible. The reason for this is that for the partners to be able to operate at a profit, they need to take their own cut, and then they need to pay Opus fees and their own expenses (employees, office space, etc.), and whatever is left over goes to the artist. The Opus fee means that the artists receive somewhat of a lower cut.

However, for the time being (this may change in the future), the partners will build their own platform and attract their own fans, but their library will not feature their own artists, but rather the Opus artists. This means that Opus artists will receive more revenue because of the diverse availability of decentralized music streaming platforms.

You mentioned that artists receive a payment based on the number of plays, but I was under the impression that they were paid by a percentage of how often they were listened during the month to compared to the rest of the platform. So if 1,000 songs were listened to this month and X band had 100 song plays (10% of the total plays), then they would earn 10% of the available monthly subscription fees for the month. Are they paid by song count, or by total percentage of song plays?

Both versions are correct and just use different wording. Yes, we mentioned that artists receive payment based on the number of plays, meaning that we use the number of plays to calculate the percentage of how often they were listened to compared to all the plays during a month. So you are correct: if band X had 100 song plays and the entire platform had 1000 plays over a month, then band X will receive 10% of the total revenue available to artists.

A track counts as being ‘played’ if a user listened to at least 2/3 of the song.

You mentioned partners are sharing technologies in the past, but that wasn’t mentioned in the article. Is Opus utilizing any technologies from its partners?

We share technology with our partners, but this does not work vice versa. The third-party technologies that we use are IBM Cloud, IPFS, Ethereum — the remainder of technologies that we use are developed in-house by our developers.

When will you guys be announcing how payments will work? Will the value of OPT be based on the current exchange rate, or will OPT be a fixed rate?

The subscription will not be at a fixed rate, because the fluctuations in the price of OPT will mean that the relative price in fiat could vary greatly from month to month. Instead, the amount of OPT necessary to subscribe will by dynamic and will be tied to a fiat currency, most likely the US Dollar (so that the subscription fee will be $X every month, paid in the equivalent amount of OPT).

How many artists have been recruited for the platform?

Currently we have 191 artists, we are very close to reaching the 200-artist milestone.

Join us on Telegram to ask more questions!

If you have any more questions about the OpenAPI Partner Platform, or any other aspect of the Opus platform, feel free to join us on our Telegram!