It’s a year since the release of Lorde’s fourth album, ‘Virgin’, and she celebrated the anniversary by dropping 49 demos for fans to enjoy – as well as teasing a new startup partnership.
“Last year we played around with making an album worth of these skeleton versions, cool composites of a few different versions,” wrote Lorde in a message to fans.
“But on Sunday night, I realised true X-rays of Virgin would be realer, funnier, more revealing of crookedness and slant, less about where we ended up than celebratory of the way of travelling.”
Here’s the kicker: “Gonna toss this all up on my friends’ new platform Lume when it launches.. will tell you more soon,” added Lorde.
Thankfully for nosy people (like us) Lume’s website is already available with some more details on its plans. The startup will be selling albums to superfans with a focus on “rare and unreleased music” – and 80% of the revenues going to artists and their teams.
“Lume is for collecting, curating and deep listening,” explains the site. It started with a belief that streaming is not the end game… We love artists with passionate fanbases, irrespective of scale. Lume is also for labels and rights holders who feel like there’s a piece missing from the digital recorded music economy.”
The pitch is that fans will get “the world of an album… a time capsule which can contain any form of media – audio, video, imagery and text – to tell the whole story of an album”.
Lume, like Lorde, hails from New Zealand, and will be launching its app on 17 July with artists including Bic Runga, Troy Kingi, School Fair, Fazerdaze and Lontalius. And Lorde, of course.
