25 years later, should Apple revive the iPod?

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the original iPod, a device that now feels like an artifact from another era. With its monochrome screen, mechanical scroll wheel, and paltry 5 GB hard drive, Apple’s pioneering music player has long been retired. Yet in a surprising turn, there’s a resurgence of interest in what it represented.

After five years of stagnation, Google searches for “MP3 Player” have tripled since last fall. A Reddit community dedicated to digital audio players now draws roughly 90,000 weekly visitors. And this spring, The New York Times ran a trend piece highlighting how iPods are suddenly fashionable among 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 catch? Apple discontinued its final iPod model in 2022. While Chinese consumer electronics makers have flooded the market with alternatives, Kell finds most of them deeply unsatisfying. “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 frustration drove Kell and a small team to begin building their own MP3 player nearly two years ago. Their device, called Sleevenote, takes a radically different approach. Instead of forcing users to scroll through endless lists of artists and songs, it centers everything around album art, displayed on a square 4-inch screen.

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

Each album appears with its full liner art, inviting you to browse it like a CD booklet or a vinyl sleeve. There are 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.

Sleevenote works with music from any DRM-free download store, including Bandcamp, Beatport, and Amazon Music. Music transfers wirelessly, and the company is building its own database of licensed album art to accompany those tracks.

The team is still early in its journey. After a small preorder campaign, Sleevenote is now having 100 “day one” units manufactured in China, with a limited number expected to ship in June. The plan is to refine hardware and software with a small group of early adopters, then scale up.

It’s an ambitious goal, and plenty could go wrong, especially when even major consumer electronics companies struggle to secure basic components. Still, Sleevenote hopes to eventually serve the millions of people buying digital music on Bandcamp and similar platforms. Bandcamp alone sells 15 million digital albums per year, with total artist payments surpassing $1.7 billion, according to the company.

“There is this streaming backlash bubbling up,” Kell says. The team initially considered adding Spotify support 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 again by making albums feel special. “It’s carrot, not stick,” Kell says.

Music streaming services like Spotify face criticism not just over royalty rates. Some fans object to their reliance on algorithms that serve up endless streams requiring little interaction with individual works. Others take issue with Spotify’s increasingly aggressive push into 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.

To be sure, millions of consumers seem content with streaming. Spotify alone has nearly 300 million paying subscribers. But subscription fatigue is growing, fueled by constant price increases across audio and video services. Spotify raised its prices for the third time in as many years this January.

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

There’s another reason some music fans are craving iPod-like devices, one that has nothing to do with pricing or business models. As smartphones absorb more of our daily lives, devices that do one thing well without bombarding us with feeds and notifications feel like a breath of fresh air. It’s the same impulse driving people to rediscover digital cameras, embrace minimalist phones, and pick up ebook readers.

That concept of single-purpose devices resonates with Kell. “It’s a Kindle for music,” he says about Sleevenote. “It’s 10,000 albums, but also just one album at a time.”