Tell you what I’m loving about this new, New Zealand-made music app that’s been unveiled: predominantly, it’s the confidence these guys have that this thing is going to work—and that it’s going to go global.

Now, if you haven’t caught up on it, let me get you across the details. The app is called Lume and it’s going to launch, I think, in the next couple of weeks or something like that. On Lume, you’re not going to be able to stream music like you do on Spotify. Instead, you’ll buy albums—and then you’ll own those albums. They’ll come with some extra stuff as well, if you’re a real music nerd—bonus material, that sort of thing.

You’re not going to pay a monthly subscription; you’re going to pay $25 an album.

Now, I don’t know if this is going to work but I think there’s a really good chance. I mean, it’s got some very smart people behind it. Duncan Greive, for example, who started The Spinoff at a time when everybody else in the media was in retreat—he’s very clever at seeing small gaps in the market and then exploiting them.

He’s got financial backing from the guy who founded Substack. He’s got backing from the guy who co-founded Letterboxd. He’s got backing from Lorde.

It’s launching right at a time when people are complaining about the AI slop being fed to them by Spotify and the weird algorithms that now determine what music we hear. It’s being launched at a time when young people are nostalgic for owning things instead of just streaming them—when artists are complaining they don’t get enough money from streamers like Spotify. This will give them much, much more money and it will give fans a chance to support artists financially.

And it’s coming at a time when Spotify has jacked up its price again, in a never-ending series of small increases that just end up costing heaps every month.

So there is a chance it could work. I mean, I think it’s going to be a smaller, die-hard fan market than the big, lazy, “press a button and listen to music” Spotify market—but it could work.

But what I love most about it is that the guys building this really believe it will work. They’re already talking about taking it global—not in a “maybe one day” way but in a “we’re starting in New Zealand, next Australia, then the US and the UK” way.

They’re already workshopping what they’ll do with problematic artists like Michael Jackson, R. Kelly and Kanye West because they think it’s going to get to that.

They are confident it’s going to work. They’re already preparing.

I love that.

I reckon that kind of confidence is sometimes the difference between whether something is successful or not. And I reckon here in New Zealand, we could do with a lot more of that big thinking.

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