I’ve seen the music industry treat fans as wallets for a long time. Tickets that cost three times what they did five years ago, with the actual artist seeing a fraction of it. Streaming that pays fractions of a cent per play. An ecosystem that has quietly, systematically extracted value from the people who love music most — while making it harder, not easier, to feel genuinely close to it.
Lume is the antidote.
The idea is simple even if I know the execution will not be. Each Lume is a digital edition of an album — the record at its core, surrounded by whatever the artist wants their real fans to have. Session versions. Outtakes. Photos from the studio. Handwritten lyrics. Video. Things that have never seen a streaming platform and probably never will. You buy it once for around US$15 and you own it forever. No subscription. No algorithm deciding what you hear next. Just the album, complete, the way it was made to be heard.
80% of net revenue goes to the artist and their partners. One purchase equals roughly 3,000 streams in value to the artist. And for the first time, when you buy a Lume, the artist actually knows you did — which matters more than it sounds, because right now most artists have no idea who their superfans are. The ticketing companies keep the concert emails and contacts. Spotify keeps the listener data. Artists have big social media profiles but they are distributed across platforms and the content is social first not music and art first and its in crappy social formats with little or no ability to show love and care. Lume gives that direct relationship between artist and superfan back.
The team is led by Duncan Greive — a great friend of mine one of New Zealand’s sharpest music journalists (he tells me) and Justin Warren, who has spent years at the sharp end of the music industry at Universal. Sacha Judd, who knows more about fandom than almost anyone, is COO and Tim Warren is CEO. They are building this from the ground up for artists, and every conversation they have with artists makes them more sure they’re onto something.
The investor cap table tells its own story. Lorde. Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack, who has already proved that a creator-first, revenue-share model can work at scale. Karl von Randow, co-founder of Letterboxd, who proved that serious fans of a medium will build a home for it if you give them somewhere worthy. These are people who understand what it takes to build for a community rather than just a market. I am in exceptionally good company.
Lume launches in New Zealand next month. Australia next. Then, if the team has anything to do with it, everywhere.
If you love music — properly love it, the kind where you know the track order and you’ve read the liner notes — go to lumemusic.com and sign up. The artists you care most about deserve a better deal. So do you.
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