Back in 2005, Tom Vek scored a 7.6 from Pitchfork with "We Have Sound," and his tracks landed on the soundtracks for The OC and GTA IV. These days, he's taken on a new role: music player entrepreneur. Since 2020, he's been developing a device called Sleevenote, inspired by vinyl record packaging—an attempt to bring back the tactile, visual experience of cover art and liner notes into digital music listening.
The first prototype didn't go smoothly. Square screens are hard components to source on their own, and the resulting unit ended up roughly the size of a 7-inch single, but thicker and heavier—far from the "portable" ideal. The current version is smaller and cheaper. The Day One Edition, with only a handful of units left, is still available at $349. His elevator pitch for Sleevenote is "the Kindle of music"—though he himself isn't really sold on e-readers, for a pretty straightforward reason: most people read one book at a time, but a music collection carries an entire catalog with you, making the case for digitization fundamentally different.
What He Hates Isn't Offline Listening—It's Retro for Retro's Sake
The tech trend Tom Vek specifically calls out in interviews is the recent surge in retro-style CD and cassette players. He agrees that people wanting a dedicated offline music experience is the right instinct, but "I want to see new ideas." He's particularly focused on digital music purchases, for a practical reason: buying a digital download does far more to support musicians than buying a used CD, since the money actually reaches the creators. As for cassettes, he's blunt about it—"the sound quality is terrible," he remembers all too well.
He doesn't want the next generation trapped in a retro loop, or locked into the subscription-based logic of big tech platforms. Instead, he wants to see genuinely thought-through independent tech products that could only exist at this exact moment in time. That's the position Sleevenote is trying to occupy: borrowing the packaging aesthetics of the vinyl era on the outside, while its core mission is to push listeners back toward a digital music consumption habit built on paying for and truly owning music, time-stamped and all.
Sleevenote currently has no availability information for Taiwan or the broader Asian market. For now, the Day One Edition is only being sold in the US as a limited run at $349.
