‘Streaming can’t be the end game’: Inside the bold new music start-up backed by Lorde

Sunday, 24 May 2026

Lume is a new app that hopes to convince listeners tired of subscriptions and algorithms to own music again. Stewart Sowman-Lund was given behind the scenes access ahead of its launch.

In mid-2025, something started to shift in the global music industry. Artists were speaking out against the creeping rise of artificial intelligence. Others were frustrated at the low revenue being generated by streaming services.

Here at home, musicians like Tiki Taane chose to remove their music from streaming provider Spotify in protest.

At about the same time, conversations were under way in Auckland among a group of well-connected, business-minded music fans about what could be done to change the way people engage with the artists they love most and the art they create.

Announced to the world on Friday, Lume is a new Kiwi business with global aspirations. It’s drawn financial backing from pop superstar Lorde, along with Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie and Letterboxd co-founder Karl von Randow.

While securing an interview with Lorde proved fruitless, the Star-Times was invited to the company’s Auckland HQ, to speak with co-founders Duncan Greive, Justin Warren, Tim Harper and Sacha Judd - all of whom have links to the wider entertainment industry.

We joined one of the team’s final staff meetings before launch. There’s a nervous, excited energy in the room.

“A lot of balls are in the air,” says Judd. “Whenever you put a hard deadline on when you're going to start telling the public, that becomes increasingly anxiety-inducing.”

Adds Greive: “100% I’m nervous - we're waiting on delivery of a bunch of different stuff, and it's been promised, and I believe them, but it's not there yet. And until it's there, you don't completely trust it. There are still vital agreements that haven't been signed.”

The world of an album

It’s probably worth explaining what exactly Lume will offer. “It's kind of an expanded edition of an album,” says Greive, who also founded media outlet The Spinoff in 2014.

“So you get the core tracks which are available on streaming sites, but you get a lot of other contextual material as well.”

That could include demos, live sets, instrumentals, handwritten lyrics or behind-the-scenes material. Each individual “Lume” will cost roughly $25 as a one-off purchase. It is not a subscription model, but closer to a digital version of a vinyl record, complete with exclusive add-ons or bonus content.

Artists will receive 80% of the revenue, which distinguishes Lume from streaming services often seen as lining the pockets of corporates over performers.

“And the whole way it's designed is about encouraging people to listen deeply right through to an album, and have it contain the properties of a physical media collection in a digital form,” says Greive.

Co-founder Harper, one of those behind the Great New Zealand Songbook, describes Lume as an entirely new format.

“You've got a tape, a CD, a vinyl - you now have a Lume. We've never seen a digital product like what we're building. Nothing's come close.”

‘We might be wrong’

Greive, who has largely stepped back from day-to-day involvement with The Spinoff to help launch the venture, is aware of the challenge ahead.

“You're trying to convince people to purchase, as opposed to subscribe, you're trying to convince artists to give you things that they're not currently releasing,” he says.

At the team meeting attended by the Star-Times, app store assets are “ready to go”, design changes are being made and artist talks are continuing.

About 25 local artists will be on the platform on day one, with a mix of “classic and contemporary” albums from household names like Fur Patrol and Tiki Taane to newcomers like Geneva AM, who scored best independent debut at last month’s Taite Music Prize.

After his Spotify protest, “it was always in our minds that we have to get Tiki,” says Greive.

While Lorde is an investor, and Greive says her support is “hugely meaningful”, her catalogue of music won’t be on there - at least for a while.

But the aim is very much to see Lume become an international platform.

Warren says talks are already under way in Australia and the UK. New Zealand will act as a test market before Lume opens out “as quickly as we can”.

Is there an audience?

Given the artists available at launch skew indie, and distinctly local, one of the biggest risks will be whether the fanbases are going to be large enough to sustain a platform like Lume.

But co-founder Sacha Judd, described by the company as a “fandom expert”, says the target market for Lume is a particular “subset” of an artist’s audience.

“It's not for everybody who listens to music,” she explains. “My passion is fans and fan communities, and in those communities there is a propensity to spend - it's just that over the last few years, it's begun to feel more and more extractive.”

Concert prices are on the rise - and travel costs often have to be factored in - while merch is “expensive and not very good quality”, says Judd.

“I think we've all got subscription fatigue,” Judd says.

”[There’s] a genuine push away from feeds that are constantly throwing content at you … which is why we see the rise in vinyl and people dusting off their iPods. People want to sit down and listen to music they've chosen.“

Adds Harper: “Streaming really can't be the end game. There has to be something more in the digital space.”

‘I want Lume to succeed’

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie is another Lume investor, and says he immediately saw that it “played on some of the same principles” that made his platform a global success.

“Lume gives more power and more options to the artists at the centre of it,” he tells the Star-Times in an exclusive interview over Zoom from San Francisco.

“It gives them a way to have a direct relationship with their audience, just like Substack allows bloggers, writers, journalists, podcasters [and] video makers to have a direct relationship with their audience that's not mediated and determined by some centralising overlord.”

McKenzie says Lume won’t be for someone who only engages with music via playlists or by having content “spoon fed” to them.

“It's not like I'm going to want to buy the Lume of every single artist I listen to on Spotify, but I can think of a handful that I really deeply care about, and I care about them as much as I care about someone in my extended community, and I want them to flourish.”

“I want Lume to succeed, not only because I've got the investment, but because I believe in the whole concept and what they're trying to do for artists.”

One of those artists is Shani Sauerman, who creates music under the name Isla Noon. She’s excited about what Lume could mean for creatives, describing the current entertainment framework as “disjointed”.

Creators have to engage with various different platforms to reach an audience, and that audience then has to piece everything together across these different outlets. On top of that, she says, everything is “filtered” through social media sites that each have their own gameable algorithms.

“If you're trying to present a really fully formed thought and project, I don't think it's all that straightforward for fans who really love what you do to find all of that in one place,” she says.

Streaming presents a “façade” of ownership, says Sauerman, who compares subscription models to a rental system. Lume will allow fans to actually buy a digital version of her work that is theirs forever.

“I know some people have gone to vinyl. It's not necessarily accessible for everyone, so it's just like another alternative.”

With streaming now embedded in our culture, the biggest unknown is whether Lume can convince music fans about the merits of ownership. Greive himself admits there are “so many things” that he might be wrong about when it comes to the overall premise.

But, he adds, “it just didn’t feel possible not to do it”.