Audius, a decentralized music sharing protocol, has raised $5.5 million in a Series A funding round from a number of prominent investors.

The funding round saw participation from General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Pantera Capital, Kleiner Perkins, 122 West, and Ascolta Ventures.

In the existing setup, a minority arbitrarily controls the music distribution for the majority as centralized music sharing platforms hoard user data.

Founded in 2018, San-Francisco-based Audius aims to create a decentralized, community-owned and artist-controlled music-sharing protocol. It said that the funding will be dedicated towards building world-class engineering, design, and community development teams that will help it achieve its goal.

By leveraging blockchain technology, Audius seeks to herald a new era in music in which artists would be able to create their following on a platform that will exist forever — regardless of the health of the company that runs it. It would help create a community-owned level playing field for artists as well as enable near-instant, fully-transparent payments.

“[Audius] is a SoundCloud-like dAPP and an open protocol that helps artists with blockchain based attribution, distribution, and monetization for their content. Audius cuts out the middleman, connecting artists directly with their fans,” it explained.

Audius advisors include Jeremy Gardner, co-founder of Augur; Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Pantera Capital; Greg Hazel, Chief Architect at BitTorrent, and others.