Roneil Rumburg and the question hiding inside the play button

A song that you could hear only on an airplane. That was the request. An artist’s team wanted to make listening depend on being in flight, and Roneil Rumburg found himself considering a rather unusual problem for a music executive: how would the software know anyone’s altitude?

The team found a possible workaround in the internet providers that serve airplane Wi-Fi. Identify those connections, and you could restrict access accordingly. Rumburg recounted the experiment without identifying the artist. It was a proposal, rather than a chart hit with a compulsory boarding pass, but it captures something about his ambitions for Audius. A song could come with rules its creator devised. The streaming service could leave room for a little mischief.

Rumburg is Audius’s co-founder and CEO. His work sits between music, software, and the economics of online communities. Those subjects can sound forbiddingly abstract together. The airplane example brings them down to a human scale, if a somewhat elevated one. Somebody has an odd idea. Can the system let them try it?

Before the platform, the drummer

His first relationship with music involved playing drums. In middle school and high school, he gravitated toward post-hardcore, drawn to its technically demanding rhythms. Playing, learning, and going to shows all belonged to the same interest. He also liked making software and seeing other people use it. Eventually engineering became the career, while music remained a serious attachment.

The listener survived the career choice. Dance music became another enthusiasm, and his circle included people trying to become producers. Alongside future co-founder Forrest Browning, he watched friends navigate the platforms on which they depended. When those communities felt excluded from decisions about discovery and curation, the problem stopped looking like an unfortunate menu change. The people supplying the music had little say in the machinery surrounding it.

There is something revealing in that route into entrepreneurship. Rumburg did not arrive with a professional recording career to rescue. He arrived as a fan who could write software. His access to the problem came through friendships and repeated encounters with the same frustration. Audius would become a way to bring his two interests back into the same working day.

The idea that had to wait

At Stanford, Rumburg studied computer science, with a focus on systems. His public education record places him there from 2011 to 2014. He had already begun technical work in high school; later came software roles and a 2013 Kleiner Perkins engineering fellowship at cloud infrastructure company Nebula. Distributed systems gave his curiosity a direction.

Cryptocurrency was initially something to investigate with friends. Rumburg and Browning met within that world of experiments. By 2015 they were considering a cooperative music platform, but judged the available technology insufficient. Their first useful decision about Audius was to put the idea away. “So we shelved it,” Rumburg later recalled.

He co-founded Backslash, a Bitcoin payment venture, and went on to work at KPCB Edge, Kleiner Perkins’s seed initiative, as an engineering partner. His responsibilities included blockchain and artificial intelligence investments; Lightning Labs was among the companies backed. Music had not disappeared. The tools were catching up with a question he had already asked.

Audius was founded in early 2018. The delay gives this origin story an appealing lack of theatre. The founders had an idea, examined what it would require, and waited. In a business culture fond of declaring that the future has arrived, a little patience can be a productive technical skill.

A student’s argument, carried forward

Rumburg’s interest in useful work predates Audius. In a 2014 student opinion piece, he defended Stanford’s connections with Silicon Valley. Faculty who moved between academic and commercial work, he argued, could bring practical knowledge back into education. At the time he was chief operating officer of the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students.

Another essay that spring considered why students start companies. He pushed back on the idea that entrepreneurship necessarily meant chasing wealth or status. In conversations with students, he found an interest in making an impact. The argument was grounded in people he knew, rather than a sweeping claim about every founder on campus.

Read alongside his later work, these essays show a recurring concern with participation: who has access to knowledge, and who can turn it into something useful? They also make him a more interesting character than the usual compressed founder biography permits. Before he was explaining a music protocol, he was already explaining why building things deserved a less cynical hearing.

One artist at a time

The earliest Audius product was private and rough. Rumburg has described onboarding artists individually, sitting with them on video calls and watching them use it. This is a small, almost domestic scene beside the grand vocabulary of decentralized networks. The task was to see what happened when a musician actually tried to upload and share something.

By September 2021 the project had attracted a $5 million investment round that included Katy Perry, Nas, Pusha T, Steve Aoki, Mike Shinoda, Disclosure, Jason Derulo, and the Chainsmokers. Celebrity backing gave the venture visibility, but the names represented several different kinds of musical careers. The question of how to reach fans had travelled well beyond the founders’ original circle.

The connections matter without making them a verdict. A famous investor does not prove that an unfamiliar business model works. It does show that the proposition had become legible to working artists. Rumburg could now discuss a system for musicians with musicians who understood the costs of distribution, the value of a following, and the difficulty of keeping a direct relationship alive.

The app is only one entrance

In an October 2021 conversation, Rumburg described Audius as a network that other developers could build upon. He said most listening at that point was already happening through third-party applications. One example was a driving game whose obstacles followed the music’s beat. Another was a community contribution that gave the website a dark mode.

These are modest examples with a large implication. A founder who welcomes alternative interfaces accepts that his own app may cease to be the main attraction. The catalogue and the relationships around it can outlast any particular screen. Users might find a better entrance, and the original team need not have designed it.

That raises practical questions about where power accumulates. Rumburg has acknowledged the possibility that a popular interface could become influential in its own right. Community governance is an intended answer, rather than a guarantee that no conflict will arise. The experiment depends on the behaviour of participants as much as the arrangement of code.

His own website offers an unusually brief introduction: “I like to make things.” He adds that he sometimes invests in what friends build, especially where crypto meets consumer products. It is a restrained self-description for someone whose company asks such expansive questions. The sentence leaves plenty of room for other people to make things too.

“I like to make things.”Roneil Rumburg · personal website

The price belongs to the artist

The economic ambition became more concrete in September 2024, when Audius opened its direct payment feature publicly after a beta introduced to more than 100 artists in November 2023. Artists could set prices for their music. Fans could pay by credit card, with the system using USDC, a digital token tied to the US dollar.

The announcement described a 10 percent allocation to the community treasury, subject to a governance proposal. That detail matters because it makes the cost visible. A claim about artist control becomes easier to evaluate when someone can ask who receives a payment and who decides the allocation.

This is a different commercial question from counting how many plays a song can accumulate. An artist can experiment with a price and an audience willing to pay it. The attraction is straightforward: a smaller group of committed listeners might support work that a broad, casual audience barely notices. Whether that produces a dependable livelihood still has to be demonstrated artist by artist.

Ownership also brings obligations. Earlier criticism from music publishers focused on unauthorized uploads and compensation for songwriters. A platform inviting musicians to control their work must account for the rights of everyone involved in that work. Openness makes the question more urgent; it cannot settle it by itself.

Learning to work with the music business

In April 2025, Audius announced a global licensing agreement with Downtown Music covering both recordings and publishing. The companies said the deal would bring millions of licensed recordings to the platform. Rumburg’s project was negotiating with the same industry whose distribution habits it wanted to change.

That is a useful complication in his story. Building more room for independent decisions does not mean every existing institution disappears. Rights holders, labels, publishers, and distributors remain part of the work of making music available. An agreement can expand the choices an artist has, even when it involves organizations already familiar to the business.

A July 2025 terms update made the relationship between openness and permission more explicit. Uploads defaulted to all rights reserved. Artists could choose Creative Commons options, and an Open Music License addressed third-party uses through the Audius API. Access settings were intended to carry across to those applications.

The distinction is worth keeping in view. Software can be open while a recording remains protected. Letting developers build with a catalogue requires rules about what each track permits. For Rumburg, the attractive future depends on that combination: more possible uses, with the artist’s choices still attached.

Another invitation to build

By February 2026, Audius and the Open Audio Protocol were pitching infrastructure for coding agents and people making applications with their help. The announcement imagined custom listening experiences built around a shared music catalogue. Rumburg named Claude Code and Codex as tools that could widen the group able to use it.

It was an extension of the earlier invitation to outside developers. The proposed audience had expanded from programmers comfortable with an API to people who could describe an application they wanted. An ambient radio station or a fan community could become another way into the music. These were possibilities presented by the project, rather than proof that every proposed experience had succeeded.

Rumburg’s trajectory has a pleasing circularity. The school-age drummer became an engineer, the engineer spent time investing, and the investor returned to building around music. Each stage supplied a different part of the problem: the enthusiasm of a listener, the habits of a systems developer, and an interest in how new ventures sustain themselves.

The next test is ordinary enough to resist a grand announcement. Can artists use these choices, get paid, and keep their fans close? Can someone else build an experience the original team would never have imagined? Somewhere in that second question there is still room for a song that asks for a boarding pass.