the honest middle on audius.

why this exists

there's the hype — the token's going up, this changes everything. and there's the doom — the price crashed, it's dead, it was always a scam. both talk about the price and skip the actual thing: a free, open place to put music, that i happen to use.

so this is the third version. what audius actually does, explained plainly, by someone who releases on it — with a confused vegetable doing the talking.

how these work

every post has two layers. on top, an absurd narrator: a cucumber sweating over whether it's a scam, a padlock explaining gated tracks, a houseplant building a radio station. that's what keeps it readable.

underneath, a real explanation of something i've actually used. the narrator is the bit; the explanation is the point.

and every post about audius opens by saying the obvious: i'm an artist on it, so i'm not neutral. i'd rather tell you that than pretend.

what this is, and isn't

it is a first-hand explainer of how audius works — listening, uploading, gating, the token sitting off to one side.

it isn't financial advice. it isn't a reason to buy anyone's coin. it isn't a neutral review. where i'm not sure, i say so — a calm explanation that bluffed would be worse than a nervous one.

who's writing this

look out loren. i make electronic music, and i've released it on audius since 2019. that's the whole qualification — not a journalist passing through, not a marketer, just someone with a catalog on the thing being explained.

there's a track of mine playing in the corner of most pages, streaming straight off audius with no app in between. press play and you've reached the same open catalog i keep writing about.

why bother

because the honest middle — not hype, not doom, just what's true and what's free — was the version i wanted to read and couldn't find. so i made it, and let the objects argue.

curious is welcome here. skeptical, too.

the music's free. the explanations are free. the catalog's here if you want to hear what all this is in service of.