The album-centric music app Lume has launched in app stores on July 17, with a slate of new and classic albums, by a roster of 100% New Zealand artists.
It’s notable for having global availability from day one, and will welcome artists from around the world in the coming months. Its arrival has seen significant support from musicians, who back its artist-friendly model, which sees 80% of net revenue returned to rightsholders.
“Music is so much more than just ‘content’,” says Fur Patrol’s Julia Deans, whose classic debut ‘Pet’ is one of the highlights of Lume’s first slate.
“Lume allows you to take time with an album, and find out where the songs came from, how they evolved. As an artist you can share some of those insights and images and bonus tracks. It’s just so appealing.”
Bring the best properties into one product
Lume was formally founded in September of 2025, backed by investors including Lorde and co-founders from Substack and Letterboxd. It’s an app for iOS and Android, based on a series of core principles:
- Lume is not a subscription product: you buy albums you love, and own them forever
- For NZ$24.99 – around the price of a CD – you get a ‘digital box set’ with significant extra material
- 80% of net revenue goes to artists and their partners
“We’re trying to bring the best properties of vinyl and streaming together into one digital product,” says co-founder Duncan Greive.
“You can think of it as a record store and a record collection, which you access like streaming, but own like a record. But along with the core audio, you get much more alongside it – while also meaningfully supporting the artist.”
So different from the streaming world
Getting to launch has involved initiating relationships with artists, managers and labels, along with key partners like Recorded Music NZ, to ensure chart eligibility and APRA to acknowledge the publishing world.
During the sprint to launch came a highlight, when Lorde announced that her acclaimed 2025 album Virgin will be coming to Lume later this year, complete with a raft of demos and rarities.
The past month has seen Lume’s co-founder Justin Warren and his colleague J9 Russell leading the assembly of the first slate of Lumes – there will be 20 available at launch, with more coming each month, including the first releases from overseas artists.
“Putting them together is the most fun part of this job,” says Warren. “We have incredible live sets from Fazerdaze, Die! Die! Die! and Tiki Taane, fascinating demos from Vera Ellen and Womb, multiple remixes from the Phoenix Foundation and a full instrumental album from Troy Kingi. It’s all just so different from the streaming world.”
Artist-forward, non-algorithmic
Artists have been willing to provide this rare, often unreleased music and supporting content in part because of Lume’s business model, which means a single sale generates income equivalent to thousands of streams. This is foundational to Lume – the idea that audiences want to support the artists they love, but that streaming only really works for artists operating at huge scale.
Hariet Ellis, of Tāmaki punk band Dick Move, says: “We’re stoked to be a part of Lume from day one. We love this artist-forward, non-algorithmic initiative. And we love that it’s home grown right here in Aotearoa. Let’s change the way people listen, support and discover music.”
“Lume came at a moment when we artists in Aotearoa were facing many problems and searching for solutions,” adds Vera Ellen. “Putting my music on here felt like taking some steps in the opposite direction of the AI slop hell hole other apps are becoming. It feels considered as a fan experience and as an artist.”
Go deeper
Along with its support for artists, Lume is also built around the idea that streaming platforms have developed in a way which favours songs and playlists over albums, despite albums continuing to be the centre of how most artists approach their work.
In this way it’s not trying to replace streaming – its founders all have streaming subscriptions and will not be giving them up – but to build a place for deep, engaged listening, separate from the feature-rich, social-style interfaces of most streaming platforms.
This is evidenced by the simplicity of its product design. After purchasing a Lume through the web store (so as to maximise revenue to artists), audiences will download the app and log in to find their Lume album waiting for them. When they open it, they will see just two buttons: Play, and Go Deeper. One starts the album in sequence (there is no shuffle mode), the other opens up the treasure chest of associated content.
Co-founder Tim Harper says: “We think it’s a radically different way to experience music digitally, one which has more in common with physical media than streaming.”
It’s the Go Deeper button which co-founder Sacha Judd, a fandom expert, believes will be the most interesting to the highly engaged audiences Lume is targeting. “This is audio, video and imagery which would otherwise have stayed in archives, and often reveals fascinating insights into the creative process. We can’t wait to have it in people’s hands,” says Judd.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source idealog.co.nz ’
