Ariko John

@GOARADIO_ is one of those projects that feels like it started from a simple, slightly frustrated question: why does listening to music for hours mostly benefit everyone except the person actually doing the listening (and often the smaller artists too)? It’s a streaming platform where you can just play music the normal way, but on the paid plans you also start earning $GOA tokens while the songs run. The tokens go into an in-app wallet, and the idea is that you can later use them for things like tickets, merch, or other stuff inside their world. It isn’t some huge liquid token you trade on big exchanges yet it’s more about utility while you listen. What they keep highlighting is the artist side. Instead of dumping all the money into one giant pot and paying mostly based on who gets the most global streams, they split your subscription only among the artists you actually spend time on. So if you mostly listen to a few smaller or mid-tier artists, those people get a bigger piece of what you pay. On the higher tiers they claim artists can take home 70–75%. The artists portal talks about real-time insights and tools for growing an audience without getting lost in the usual system. You can use it free if you just want to stream and make playlists. Premium is where the earning starts, and Exclusive gives you a higher token rate plus some extra perks. They show prices in local currency, and you can cancel whenever. The catalog has been growing (they’ve talked about tens of thousands of songs), with a clear lean toward African music alongside everything else. The app side has been getting more social too, chats inside the app, seeing what friends are playing, sending tokens in conversations, personalized listening stats, offline downloads on the Android beta, that kind of thing. It still feels like it’s being built in public. Some parts are polished, others are clearly still rolling out. Overall it comes across as a small team trying to make streaming feel a bit fairer for both the people making the music and the people spending hours with it, especially with an African base but aiming wider. You can check it at goaradio.org or the app at app.goaradio.org if you want to poke around yourself.