25 years later, is it time for a new iPod?

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the original iPod. With its monochrome display, mechanical scroll wheel, and 5 GB hard drive, Apple’s pioneering music player now looks like the relic of a bygone era.

And yet, in a surprising twist, there’s growing interest in a redo.

After being essentially flat for five years, Google searches for “MP3 Player” tripled since last fall. A Reddit group for fans of digital audio players is now attracting 90,000 visitors per week on average. And this spring, The New York Times published a trend piece on how iPods are suddenly in fashion with teenagers.

“It’s great to see younger generations who [didn’t] experience the iPod the first time around finding out about it and being like: That 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 makers trying to fill the gap, Kell has found a lot of them lacking. “The user interfaces of all of these digital music players are shockingly bad,” he says. “Most are essentially just Android phones with the phone stuff removed.”

That’s why Kell and a small group of collaborators began working on their own MP3 player close to two years ago. Sleevenote, as the device is called, has a very different interface than many of its predecessors: Instead of making you browse endless databases of artist names and song titles, it’s all about album art, which is being presented on a square 4-inch screen.

“We’re pro whole albums,” Kell says. “We want you to focus on one album at a time.”

Each album is being shown with full liner art, which you can browse just like you would have explored a CD booklet, or a record sleeve. There’s also no playlists, no algorithms, no endless shuffle. You play an album from beginning to end, then pick the next one. “It’s something in between a vinyl and an iPod,” Kell says.

The Sleevenote device is compatible with music from all DRM-free download stores, including Bandcamp, Beatport, and Amazon Music. Music is being transferred to the device wirelessly, and Sleevenote is working on building out its own database of licensed album art to accompany those tracks.

The Sleevenote team is still early in its journey. After launching a small preorder campaign, the startup is currently having 100 “day one” devices manufactured in China, with Kell telling me that a limited number of units will be available for sale in June. The plan is to refine hardware and software with a small group of early adopters, and then scale up from there.

It’s an ambitious plan, and a lot could go wrong — especially at a time when even major consumer electronics companies struggle to get their hands on the most basic components. Still, Sleevenote hopes to eventually cater to the millions of people who have been buying digital music on Bandcamp and similar platforms. Bandcamp alone now sells 15 million digital albums per year, with total payments to artists surpassing $1.7 billion to date, according to company information.

“There is this streaming backlash bubbling up,” Kell says. The Sleevenote team did initially consider adding Spotify support to its device as well, but ultimately decided against it. “It’s not going to be a streaming device, it’s going to be for music that is owned,” he says. “What is needed is for music tech companies to have some integrity, to stand up for artists.”

At the same time, Sleevenote wants to make buying digital music fun by making albums feel special. “It’s carrot, not stick,” Kell says.

Music streaming services like Spotify don’t just face criticism over royalty rates. Some music fans also take issue with their reliance on algorithms to serve up endless streams that require little to no interaction with individual works of music, while others criticize Spotify’s increasingly aggressive marketing of podcasts. “It’s almost mad that you pay for it [given] how much you’re getting advertised, and getting pulled away into other places,” Kell says.

Granted, millions of consumers do seem to be content with paying for streaming music services. Spotify alone now has nearly 300 million paying subscribers. However, there’s also a growing subscription fatigue, fueled in part by the constant price increases for audio and video streaming services. Spotify raised its prices for the third time in as many years in January.

“The more and more smartphones consolidated gadgets, the worse it got for consumers,” wrote the moderator of the aforementioned digital audio player Subreddit recently. “Suddenly everything was a subscription, and nothing was owned.”

There is another reason some music fans have been yearning for iPod-like devices that has nothing to do with price points and business models. With smartphones taking over so much of our lives, devices that are good at one thing but don’t distract us with endless feeds and notifications suddenly are seen as a breath of fresh air. It’s the same reason people are rediscovering digital cameras and embracing 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 about Sleevenote. “It’s 10,000 albums, but also just one album at a time.”