it is low pass By Junko RoettgersA newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of technology and entertainment, syndicated exclusively for The Verge Customers once a week.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the original iPod. With its monochrome display, mechanical scroll wheel and 5GB hard drive, Apple’s pioneering music player now looks like a relic of a bygone era.
And yet, in a surprising twist, interest in re-creation is growing.
After remaining essentially stable for five years, searches for “MP3 player” on Google have tripled since last fall. A Reddit group for fans of digital audio players is now attracting an average of 90,000 visitors per week. And this spring, the new York Times Published a trend article on how iPods have suddenly become fashionable among teenagers.
“It’s great to see the younger generation [didn’t] “Experience going out and learning about the iPod for the first time: It sounds like a great idea,” says musician and startup founder Tom Kell.
The only problem: Apple discontinued its last iPod model in 2022. And while there has been a flood of devices from Chinese consumer electronics manufacturers trying to fill this gap, Kell has found that many of them are missing. “The user interfaces on all these digital music players are shockingly bad,” he says. “Most are essentially just Android phones with the phone content removed.”
That’s why Kell and a small group of colleagues started working on their own MP3 player about two years ago. The interface of the Sleevenote, as the device is called, is very different than many of its predecessors: instead of you having to browse an endless database of artist names and song titles, it’s all about the album art, which is being presented on a square 4-inch screen.
“We’re advocates of the whole album,” says Kell. “We want you to focus on one album at a time.”
Each album is featured with full liner art, which you can browse just as you would browse a CD booklet, or a record sleeve. There are no playlists, no algorithms, no endless shuffling. You play an album from beginning to end, then choose the next. “It’s something between vinyl and an iPod,” says Kell.
The SleeveNote device is compatible with music from all DRM-free download stores, including Bandcamp, Beatport, and Amazon Music. The music is being transferred to the device wirelessly, and Sleevenote is working on building its own database of licensed album art with those tracks.
The Sleevenote team is still in the early stages of their journey. After launching a small preorder campaign, the startup currently has 100 “day one” devices manufactured in China, with Kel telling me that a limited number of units will be available for sale in June. The plan is to refine the hardware and software with a small group of early adopters and then grow to a larger scale from there.
It’s an ambitious plan, and a lot could go wrong – especially at a time when major consumer electronics companies are struggling to get their hands on even the most basic components. Still, Sleevenote hopes to eventually meet the needs of the millions of people who are purchasing digital music on Bandcamp and similar platforms. According to company information, Bandcamp alone now sells 15 million digital albums per year, with total payments to artists to date exceeding $1.7 billion.
“This streaming backlash is bubbling up,” says Kell. The Sleevenote team also initially considered adding Spotify support to their devices, but ultimately decided against it. “It won’t be a streaming device, it will be for owned music,” he says. “Music tech companies need to have some integrity, stand up for the artists.”
Plus, Sleevenote wants to make buying digital music fun by making albums special. “It’s the carrot, not the stick,” says Kell.
Music streaming services like Spotify don’t just face criticism over royalty rates. Some music fans also take issue with the reliance on algorithms to present endless streams that require little or no interaction with individual works of music, while others criticize Spotify’s increasingly aggressive marketing of podcasts. “It’s almost crazy that you pay for it [given] “How much you’re being advertised to, and being pulled to other places,” says Kell.
Granted, millions of consumers are content paying for streaming music services. Spotify alone now has nearly 300 million paying subscribers. However, the lack of subscription is also increasing due to the continuous price increases for audio and video streaming services. Spotify raised its prices for the third time in as many years in January.
The moderator of the aforementioned digital audio player subreddit recently wrote, “The more smartphones consolidate gadgets, the worse it gets for consumers.” “Suddenly everything became a subscription, and nothing was owned.”
There’s another reason why some music fans are yearning for devices like the iPod that have nothing to do with price points and business models. As smartphones take over so much of our lives, devices that are good at one thing, but don’t distract us with endless feeds and notifications, are suddenly seen as a breath of fresh air. This is why people are rediscovering digital cameras and adopting minimalist phones and ebook readers.
The concept of such single-purpose devices is something Kell can get behind. “It’s a Kindle for music,” he says of the Sleevenote. “It’s 10,000 albums, but also just one album at a time.”
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