Introducing Audio Prime & The Audius Discovery Node Explorer

Audio Prime is a data & analytics exploration site for Audius

We are happy to announce the first feature of Audio Prime! To christen our site, we have enabled a public Audius Discovery Node Status Explorer.

On this page, you'll be able to inspect the status of all Audius Discovery Nodes active on the Audius Network. We've elected to display the block indexing status for the chains used in the Audius Ecosystem: Ethereum & Solana.

Why this matters:

Smart contracts running on Ethereum & Solana are responsible for different aspects of the Audius application. For example, Ethereum smart contracts save and track almost all of the data that artists care about, such as follower count, track metadata, repost count, etc. Solana contracts are currently responsible for keeping tallies on play counts.

Due to the nature of Audius (decentralized web3), these values may not always be consistent, as users logging onto Audius may be connected to different discovery nodes that aren't always in sync.

To elaborate, Audius is a unique application, in contrast to something like Soundcloud or Spotify. Soundcloud will store and track all of this information in a centralized database that they own. They have complete control over the data, can modify it at their whim, and can determine what data you and I have access to.

On the other hand, Audius uses both Ethereum and Solana to handle their data. Since this data is stored on the blockchain, it can never be modified or deleted, and is available to view by everyone. To make the Audius application faster, the various Discovery Nodes constantly scan the blockchains to store and aggregate this data, and make it readily available for Audius Users.

However for various reasons, certain discovery nodes may be faster at scanning and saving this data (this process is called indexing). As a result, there may be times where a discovery node falls behind, and the data you see when you use Audius will be confusing, such as seeing a track with fewer plays today than when you saw it yesterday.

If you're an artist and this happens, this can be a bit concerning. However, it just means that the node you're connected to is a bit behind. It doesn't mean that the team behind Audius deleted your rightfully earned plays. When you log onto audius, the node you're connected to is random and not something you can control. In some cases, refreshing or opening up a new tab/window will refresh your tracks plays to the current number.

This type of use case is a principle reason why we built this dashboard. We have enabled a sort function so you can quickly see how far behind the various discovery nodes are as they index the relevant blockchain. (Again, Solana for play counts, Ethereum for everything else).

On our end, this page itself is always kept up to date, as we check the indexing status of each discovery node every five minutes and save that data for you to inspect. We also provide estimates on how far behind each discovery node is from the most recent data published to each blockchain, using Ethereum and Solana's block/slot time (14 seconds & 400 milliseconds, respectively).

We are big believers in bringing blockchain and web3 tech to the music industry, and love what we've seen from Audius so far. We hope this initial feature is useful for you. Also, we have some exciting new Audius analytics features planned to rollout in the near future, so stay tuned!

If you have any feedback, please connect with us on twitter (twitter.com/audioprime), and we encourage you to subscribe to this newsletter if you're interested.