Lightning FM is a music platform built on Bitcoin Lightning and Nostr. Artists publish their catalog as Nostr events signed by their own key. Listeners stream free, no account. When a fan buys a track, the payment settles straight to the artist's own Lightning wallet: we never hold the money, so we structurally cannot take a cut.
That architecture is also what makes the software here open source. If Lightning FM disappeared tomorrow, the code that reads and writes an artist's catalog wouldn't disappear with it: it's already public, and anyone, including you, can run it.
| Repo | What it is |
|---|---|
| lightning-fm-desktop | The artist desktop app. Publish tracks, play back the catalog, run an embedded Lightning node. Tauri + Rust, macOS today. |
| lightning-fm-artist-nodes | A headless Lightning node daemon for artists who'd rather run their catalog from their own hardware than the desktop app. Rust + ldk-node. |
| lightning-fm-mcp | An MCP server over the same public catalog: search tracks, look up artists, check what's live, from an agent. No separate agent API. Node + TypeScript, also on npm as lightning-fm-mcp. |
All three repos are MIT. Fork them, modify them, run them commercially: nothing in the license says otherwise.
Not open source, and not meant to be: the marketing site and the station server that programs the radio stream. Those are operational infrastructure, not something an artist runs, and they hold details that don't belong in a public repo.
- Catalog: Nostr events, signed by the artist's own key, readable by any client. Not a row in our database.
- Payments: settle wallet-to-wallet over Lightning. The platform is never in the money path.
- Software: MIT, public, runs on your own hardware, no invite required. What's gated is only the hosted convenience layer (relay listing, media hosting, a lightning.fm name) for artists who'd rather not run their own.
Read the full breakdown: exit rights, defined and is the software open source?
