When most musicians branch out into other fields they set up their own clothing label or launch a new booze brand. But Tom Vek has much grander plans than having his own trainer range or a bottle of vodka with his name on it.
Vek is the man behind four studio albums and one digital audio player called Sleevenote – a pocket-sized attempt to bring some value back to music. He released his debut album We Have Sound in 2005, but it was during the recording of the follow-up, 2011’s Leisure Seizure, that the seed for Sleevenote was planted.
Apple’s iTunes Store had really blown up in the interim and all of a sudden album artwork had gone from being something fans would pore over on the bus home from HMV to a tiny bundle of pixels on a screen.
“I was very taken with the industrial design of the iPod,” says Vek over Zoom from his house in Margate.
“It was very unusual for things to be bright white and it had a sort of sci-fi friendliness, almost like NASA. But the cover art was tiny and the rest of the sleeve art was missing.”
As somebody who had grown up with physical media and studied graphic design at art school, the visual element of an album was almost as important to him as the music itself. As well as writing and recording everything you heard on his records, Vek also designed everything you saw, so to have it reduced to the size of a postage stamp frustrated him.
An alternative to streaming
Vek met his Sleevenote co-founder Chris Hipgrave in 2018 and the pair spent a couple of years working on app ideas that would bring that focus back to the artwork, but the rise of nasty freemium models and what he calls “App Store bureaucracy” pushed them towards exploring their dream product: a digital music player with a square screen for showing off album artwork properly.
It's just insane that a music service can have such bad press and still have a monopoly.
Tom Vek on Spotify's dominance
After a failed crowdfunding campaign in 2020, and the news in 2021 that Spotify founder Daniel Ek had started funding military technology, Vek and Hipgrave decided to go all-in on a product that would give music fans an alternative to streaming.
“I know as an artist that it actually costs you to really be on Spotify, because they have all these extra features to push your music that mean you get paid even less,” says Vek.
“It's just insane that a music service can have such bad press and still have a monopoly.”
Sleevenote’s Day One Edition, which sold out all 100 of its available units earlier this summer, has a 4-inch touchscreen for displaying full artwork and liner notes, which can be uploaded by artists who, like Vek, want fans to experience the full package. For albums that don’t have it, Sleevenote can still pull in basic artwork from the internet.
The aluminium case also includes six physical buttons to control power, playback and volume, while both wired and wireless headphones are welcome thanks to Bluetooth 5.4 and a 3.5mm socket. It supports hi-res audio files and you get 256GB of storage to fill.
App-free listening
Just as important to Sleevenotes raison d’etre, though, is what the device doesn’t do. It runs on Android but there are no apps or phone calls; no Spotify or other streaming services; and while it does have Wi-Fi it’s only for transferring tunes and sending certain listening data directly to the Sleevenote Discord community.
Instead, there’s a real focus on using sites like Bandcamp in order to financially support the artists as fully as possible. According to Sleevenote’s website, if you spend $10 on a digital download, $8 goes to the artist – a much higher proportion than even buying a vinyl record or some merch (which when bought at live shows can often be subject to the venue taking a cut), and a whole world away from the miniscule payments they receive from streaming.
“It's good to buy music,” says Vek. “It's good for the artist but it's also good for people to actually own it.”
Anyone who’s a fan of a band who has pulled their music from Spotify, as Godspeed You! Black Emperor and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard did after news of Ek’s investments broke, will attest to that.
A Trojan horse
Vek is not the first musician to move into this kind of hardware either. Neil Young’s PonoPlayer aimed to improve on the sound quality offered by more mainstream devices but its existence was short-lived. After a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $6m, the PonoPlayer started shipping in late 2014, but by April 2017 it went the way of the dodo, with Young citing the higher cost of hi-res audio files as the main reason for its demise.
Sleevenote is a much smaller operation and doesn’t rely on its own music store, so pricing of downloads isn’t a concern, although Vek is keen to find a way to make the device itself more affordable (the Day One Edition was £249/$349). He also wants to improve the battery life, which currently stands at between six and eight hours.
Tech that deals with culture needs to be built by people who really do passionately care about that culture.
Tom Vek
For Vek, though, his main hope for Sleevenote is bigger than sales. He sees it as a “kind of Trojan Horse that encourages people to actually buy music.” That’s a pretty lofty ambition, with streaming too convenient to resist for most listeners, but there are signs of hope.
Gen Z is driving a resurgence in CDs and MP3 players, while a significant proportion of people who buy vinyl don’t even own a turntable to play their records on, so there’s clearly a desire among some music fans to support artists properly.
As both a recording artist and a tech fan, it feels like Vek couldn’t be better placed to create a product like Sleevenote.
“Tech that deals with culture needs to be built by people who really do passionately care about that culture,” he says.
“To see music battered around so much by it has been really frustrating.”
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