Hello Musician and Venue friends, welcome to Lumin! My name is Derek and I am the founder of Lumin and as this is my first official blog post I should probably tell you a little about who we are, what we are doing and why. We are a small technology startup based in Calgary and we are building a platform that connects grassroots artists with venues to book and promote live events. I have three talented daughters who are all performing artists, I saw how hard they have to work to share their talents and also how difficult it can be to build a career in the arts. There can be so many boxes to check, emails to send, websites to update and murky show details. There had to be an easier way to allow artists to get back to being an artists, not just an administrator. Ideas rolled around in my head for a few years and finally started to take shape at the end of 2016 when we launched Lumin and booked our first show with Christina Colyn at Gravity Cafe in Inglewood. We have come a long way in a short time, we have now booked over 600 shows with new Artists and Venues joining the platform daily. Lumin is growing out of the grassroots of the arts community, whether you are an emerging or experienced artist, we provide a platform for everybody. We provide just a little bit of structure to make it easier to connect, contract and promote gigs in what can be chaotic space.
Our lead Software Developer and chief smart guy is Kiley Hykawy. I am happy to report Kiley and his team are hard at work on evolving the platform to add new features based on your feedback. Lots of exciting new changes are coming soon so watch this space!
We are grateful to folks like Andy Fennell from Gravity Cafe and Sylvia Johnston from Cornerstone Music Cafe who believed in our vision early on and provided ideas, feedback and a place for us to grow and learn. Thanks to this we are now getting traction in many venues throughout Calgary. A new event I am excited to tell you about is a songwriter in the round series called Village Voices! which is taking place weekly at the Ironwood. Village Voices will be a collaboration between Village Brewing, The Ironwood and Lumin. It will feature an established artists paired with emerging new songwriters so watch for the official announcement and details coming soon!
I love talking to artists and venues and other member of the music community, so please feel free to contact me at derek@lumin.life.
Derek
