maml

nostr

I have been building Lightning FM, a music platform on Lightning + Nostr.

How it works:

- Streaming is free for everyone, no account.
- When a fan buys a download, they pay an invoice minted by the artist's own wallet. Settlement is confirmed via LUD-21 and the download unlocks. The platform's cut is 0% because the money never touches us.
- The catalog is kind 31337 events signed by the artist's key on an open-read relay. Any client or agent can read it; the wire format is documented at [lightning.fm/interop](https://lightning.fm/interop).
- First mainnet sale settled to a self-hosted artist node (a Raspberry Pi) on 2026-08-03.

Honest limits: we run infrastructure, so here is exactly what we hold. The streaming copy of each track lives on our Blossom server, content-addressed and open to read, so anyone can fetch it by hash at any time, the artist included. The paid master either lives on the artist's own node and never touches us, or, for hosted artists, sits in private storage the artist can pull back out whenever they want. We also run a relay and issue names. We do not claim decentralization. The claim is narrower: leaving costs an artist nothing, because the catalog, the name, the files, and the payment rails are theirs.

Artist onboarding is early access at [lightning.fm](https://lightning.fm). Feedback welcome, especially from other musicians and from anyone building on Nostr.