Ep. 173 - LUM's Max Fergus on Disrupting the Music Industry

Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Max Fergus, Founder and CEO of LUM, a music streaming app rooted in the discovery of emerging music. Brian and Max discuss disruption, entrepreneurship, trends, content creation, building a team, and corporate startup collaboration.

Read the interview transcript at insideoutside.io

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.IO a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products launched new ideas and compete in a world of change and disruption each week will give you a front-row seat to the latest Thinking, Tools, tactics, and Trends and collaborative Innovation. Let's get started.

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. We are excited to be live here from Milwaukee at Fall Experiment today. We have another amazing a guest Max Fergus. He is the founder and CEO of a company called Lum. Welcome to the show Max.

Max Fergus: Thank you so much. Brian looking forward to it. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's get started. You've just got off stage to talk a little bit about your business and some of the new disruptions that are going on in the music industry. Let's start there. Tell me a little bit about Lum and what are you seeing in this crowded space of music?

Max Fergus: You know the truth is that when most people talk about music disruption, they write it off right away. There's a lot of corpses in the music industry, especially when it comes to emerging music. We've seen a lot of companies over the last five years try to create what a lot of people would call Spotify clones that just focus on emerging music. But the truth is that for the large part corporate and mainstream music is better than emerging music. If we are just trying to give these emerging artist a better chance to survive, if we give them the average fan or the end user the same experience that they're going to get on Spotify and try to compete with algorithms that none of us can compete with, we're not going to be able to do anything for the fan and we're surely not going to help the artist. So the truth is and what Lum is rooted in is looking at the technology that exists all around the world that's currently empowering content creators. That use streaming technology and putting that technology into music streaming for the first time, and that's really what Loom is all about. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about your background. So as a Founder, it's always interesting to me to have an interview with entrepreneur and say how did they get to this space? I know you have a diverse background you spent some time in China, I did as well, and I'm interested in finding out a little bit about how that nugget of the problem that you saw out there and and the experiences that you brought to the table, gave you the decision to say, let's start this company.

Max Fergus: Yeah, the truth is that most people think that when you start a company in college you either start it around booze or music? And so we already had a little bit of a disadvantage there because people automatically assume that we were starting another College startup, especially coming from a place like Madison in which case booze and music are both very prevalent. But the truth is that we didn't start Lum. With the understanding that we were going to do music right away. We looked at industries that were growing rapidly like streaming like music streaming and made our decision based off the ones that were the most likely to be disrupted and music streaming was really powerful because it hasn't just been growing really really far in the past. But it's growing exceptionally fast right now and it's going to grow even more so over the next 10 years

Read the interview transcript at insideoutside.io