Lorde, Tiki Taane and other artists are throwing their weight behind this Kiwi music startup

Sunday, 19 July 2026

Music tech startup Lume launches a 'digital box set' format for music albums.

The platform features an artist-friendly model, offering an 80/20 revenue split.

It aims to restore an intimate album experience away from passive streaming algorithms.

To earn the minimum wage in New Zealand via music streaming services, you’d need to secure roughly 606,000 streams per month on Spotify, 285,000 streams of Apple Music or a staggering 1.6 million via YouTube Music.

And to ensure your earnings were sustainable, you’d need to keep delivering those volumes every single month.

These numbers, sourced from a guide by music marketing expert Chris Robley, paint a stark picture of how difficult it is for artists – particularly those with smaller fanbases – to survive on streaming revenue.

The streaming landscape is incredibly top-heavy, with the vast majority of funds ending in the pockets of the top percentile of musicians globally. The top 10% of global streamers account for 99.4% of all streams and the revenue that brings.

To put this into perspective, an artist as globally ubiquitous as Right Said Fred, who gave the world the earworm 'I’m Too sexy“ hovers around 424,000 monthly listeners and would just barely be crossing that threshold necessary for the minimum wage here in New Zealand.

It’s in this context that we have the emergence of Kiwi tech startup Lume, which is looking to give something back to artists while also offering fans a level of exclusivity that’s been lost in the age of the algorithm.

The company’s co-founder Tim Harper tells me that Lume is a different way for fans to experience an album.

Lume functions like a digital box set, allowing fans to buy an artist’s album but then also gain access to extra tracks, B-sides, behind-the-scenes footage, backstage photos, handwritten lyrics, expanded artwork, full photoshoots and more.

It’s essentially a music fan’s opportunity to really feel a sense of ownership of something unique that the artist is putting out into the world.

Harper tells me it’s akin to that experience of buying a CD and listening along to every track while reading along to the lyrics.

“We’re trying to replicate those experiences that we love in the physical, but doing it in the digital space,” says Harper.

“A Lume is everything that the artist possibly wants you to consider about the world of the album.”

Lume isn’t a subscription service. Once you buy a Lume (priced at $24.99), you own it in much the same way that you would a CD or a vinyl record.

Their belief is that there are enough fans out there willing to spend this amount of money to capture small piece of what makes their favourite artists so special.

And Harper stresses that this isn’t to be confused with the NFT space, which is built on the assumption that someone else might be willing to pay more down the line for a digital token you currently own.

“We’re not interested in the tradability of a Lume,” says Harper.

“A Lume is something that you own permanently.”

Artists backing the idea

Lume’s revenue model will be based on an 80-20 split, with the artist (and their label) taking the lion’s share of the money generated from the sale of a Lume.

This aspect has made it appealing to a number of local artists who have thrown their support behind the project.

Lorde, Tiki Taane, Bic Runga, Vera Ellen, Erny Belle, Geneva AM and Fur Patrol are just some of the artists involved at launch.

“Everyone knows that the current streaming system is broken for artists and music lovers, so Lume is a great step in the right direction for people who give a shit about music,” Taane responded when asked why he’s supporting the initiative.

“Apart from being Aotearoa NZ made, and a platform that doesn't invest in war tech and other corrupt entities, I think Lume are building something meaningful and exciting”.

After a 34-year career, Taane has seen it all in the music industry, but says that what makes the current moment interesting are various tools and pathways that musicians can now use to expand their brands.

Harper agrees with this sentiment, noting that the aim isn’t to replace or even compete with the larger streaming services.

“I’m as guilty as anybody over the last couple of years of being persuaded by my algorithm and I’ve come to see streaming as a great place for discovery… It’s almost like the best radio station I could ever have.”

Lume, he argues, wants fans to go deeper than streaming allows.

“If I fall in love with an artist on streaming and want to go a little bit deeper, that’s where Lume sits. It’s that kind of love that fans have with artists.”

There’s also a massive financial benefit for the creators: the sale of a single Lume is equivalent to the revenue an artist would usually earn from thousands of individual streams. This upfront injection creates a strong incentive for them to share rare, archival, and behind-the-scenes assets that wouldn’t otherwise be available on the social web.

Resisting the urge of enshittification

Harper and his three co-founders – Duncan Greive, Sacha Judd and Justin Warren – have secured seed funding from Ella Yelich-O’Connor (Lorde), Substack’s Hamish McKenzie, Letterboxd’s Karl von Randow, Previously Unavailable’s James Hurman and former Sky TV CEO John Fellet.

He tells me their hope is to retain founder ownership for as long as possible to ensure that the business stays true to his aspiration of giving fans the equivalent of a digital record or CD collection.

The internet has shown time and again that good ideas can sometimes be vulnerable to degradation caused by the perverse commercial imperatives that exist online.

Pointing to the examples of Facebook, Amazon and Google, the author Cory Doctorow described the general decay of online experiences as the “enshittification” of the internet.

“We want to maintain strict control over vision,” says Harper, explaining that this entire concept was developed in direct response to industry frustration and the lack of proper album experience for modern fans.

Their hope is that this business can solve both of those problems at the same time.