A new album-focused streaming platform/app/thing from kiwi co-founders was announced today. Definitely interesting, possibly awesome.
Today Duncan the Spinoff guy and friends have announced a new app called Lume. Taglines include “Your music collection, without subscriptions or interruptions” and “The world of an album”. Unsurprisingly, the morning media blitz was a strong one (read about it on Stuff, hear about it on RNZ, get the co-founder’s take on his own website, etc etc), so this isn’t a recap of the news. Just some quick thoughts from a music fan who’s worked in the digital industry for too long.
1. Yay for albums
I just really like the way that Lume is treating the album as the most important unit of music. It might feel a bit old school, but they’ve recognised something true. A good album is better than any individual song on it. A great album is a listener’s lifelong companion. If Lume helps more people find great albums, it will deserve massive success.
2. An encouraging range of NZ artists are in the at ground floor, but someone’s missing
The NZ Herald has reported that there’ll be 25 albums at launch, and that Lume has gotten chummy with Flying Nun and Lil Chief. For now no actual Lumes have dropped and there are thirteen bands and artists featured on the website. You’ve got names that go back to the glory days of the CD, like Tiki Taane (Past, Present, Future, 2007) and Fur Patrol (Pet, 2000), all the way through to Geneva AM whose Pikipiki won the Best Independent Debut award at this year’s Taite Music Prize.
There’s a good genre spread, too. Party punks Dick Move are there alongside the indie folk of Womb and the near-indescribable indigenous dream-pop of Theia. High quality, broad spectrum.
The most obvious commonality? Everyone here is from New Zealand. That’s very understandable, and ought to help Lume carve its first niche. But there’s no indication that Lume sees itself as an Aotearoa music app in the long term.
The first musician in the Lume headlines was Lorde, who’s there as an investor. Look through the album drops that they’re teasing, though, and she’s missing. You don’t need to spend too long thinking about major label deals and music industry lawyers to understand why that absence might exist. But it’s a bit jarring that someone with skin in the game and, presumably, a line to the big corner office at Universal Music hasn’t got any music in the launch marketing. Hopefully this isn’t a sign of insurmountable licensing deals when/if Lume looks overseas.
3. Naming things is hard
Lume, the company, wants you download Lume, an app, where you can buy and store things that are a lot like albums but are actually called Lumes. Not confusing at all.
4. File formats matter, and “forever” is a big promise
Three things quoted from Lume’s site:
- “Buy it once, own it forever.”
- “Lumes you own can be downloaded within the app for offline listening and viewing.”
- “Who owns the content in a Lume? You do. Artists and rights holders retain ownership of their music and content — Lume is the platform that sells and delivers it.”
My reading of this is that you’re not getting downloadable MP3s or videos. Like “downloadable” songs in Spotify, or like ebooks you buy from Amazon on a Kindle, the files are tied to the app. In that world “own it forever” means “own it for as long as we keep the media players up to date and working”.
This isn’t the place for an essay about what ownership means in a digital world awash with proprietary software. Let’s just say that digital start-ups don’t exactly have a 100% chance of permanent success and “forever” is a hell of a promise to make. Feel free to apply your own smell test.
5. Paying? For music? That I can’t put on a shelf?
The biggest question is economic. We don’t know what a Lume will cost—Shayne Currie interviewed Duncan Grieve and came away saying they’ll be $25 each; one of the founding investors reckons “around US$15”; Lume’s FAQs say that artists will set prices themselves—but we know that it’ll be more than $0. That’s going to require a change of behaviour from a lot of people, or a redirection of spending from others.
Lumes are not designed to replace background streaming or your all-you-can-eat Spotify Premium. That means they’re fighting for whatever dollars get spent on recorded music already, or they’re hoping to increase the overall amount of money spent on audio entertainment.
If you’re one of the people spending those dollars already, there’s a good chance that you’re part of the massive vinyl resurgence. And let’s be honest, you’re probably looking at those beautiful 12 inch covers while you’re streaming the tunes. The value of the physical object is that you can display it, handle it, conspicuously consume it even when you’re not listening. On the other hand, the ballpark Lume prices quoted today are helpfully lower than the $50-100 that those vinyl circles typically cost.
If you’re not a music spender today but Lume turns you into one, it will have offered you something that hasn’t been available until now, and which you really want. Let’s look at how that could happen.
6. Is it Patreon for music? Subscription-free Tidal? Bandcamp but curated? Substack for your ears? OnlyFans with clothes? Yes, kinda.
Lume is remixing familiar aspects of digital distribution and calling it something new. That’s not me throwing shade; it’s how innovation works. The overall model—high quality digital content (ugh, I hate that word) that you pay for—has plenty of echos around the internet. So does its promise to actually benefit the artists who make that content.
Like Patreon or Substack, the creator of the stuff brings in the paying customers. In return, they get most of the money.
Like Tidal, there’s a selling point aimed at what you might call ethical music fans: The dollars that you spend will not make app developers rich. They will make musicians less poor.
Like Bandcamp, there’s no monthly subscription. You decide what, if anything, you buy and when. In its pitch decks Lume can’t include the two words that are most likely to make funders salivate: “recurring revenue”.
Unlike any of the above, there’s intense curation with Lume. Artists can’t just sign up and start posting. Every album (sorry, Lume) will have been specially selected and its accompanying ephemera created in collaboration with Lume themselves.
So the money is only going to come in if Lumes contain things that fans value. Think demos of your favourite songs, rare live recordings, behind-the-scenes videos, musicians’ diaries and so on. Stuff that might otherwise get chucked on YouTube, posted on Instagram or left in a folder for later/never. With the right packaging these things can become a product worth shelling out for.
People pay for words on Substack. Words! Don’t they know how many words are already on the internet for free? They pay for something completely different on OnlyFans despite that thing being very, very available elsewhere. They pay for downloads from Bandcamp. In every case words like “community” and “supporter” get thrown around, elevating the exchange from consumption to something more enlightened.
Lume’s challenge is to get the packaging, the exclusivity, and the feeling of the deal right. My fingers are simultaneously crossed and creeping towards my wallet.
