Tom Kell Talks Music, Design, Streaming and Latest Projects

Tom Kell designs things for music. He also makes music, but we’ll leave that subject for another chitchat.

Today is about the ‘designs’, the ‘things’ and how his creative endeavors in digital product design are helping to boost the music experience.

With a quartet of projects presently seizing his artistic attention, the music+design space is heating up with Tom’s new products and services.

We recently had a nice, in-depth chat with Tom to get more details about his latest work, and works-in-progress.

P&S: What was the jumping-off point to start designing products for music?

I studied graphic design at art school, because I’d discovered that album art was called “graphic design”.

I had been making music in my own time since a teenager, and shortly after I graduated I had some label interest and spent the next 10 years navigating being a recording artist during what we all know to be a pretty turbulent era for the music industry.

I experienced releasing an album “the old way”: physical formats, flyers, stickers, anticipation; through the iTunes debundling and then the looming streaming blitzscale.

As a designer I’d always loved branding, but my frustrations with music experiences lead me to want to work in the area of digital product design, discovering how user interface and experience would digitally replace a lot of physical experience, and wanted to find a way to focus my energy in this area.

P&S: Talk about Sleevenote and how that’s going.

There’s so much great art that’s been created for CD and LP packaging and I think it’s a travesty that only the cover art made it over to the digital versions. Around 2012 I decided to try to build something that could host additional artwork.

I’d been speaking with some early app developers and discovered that with an API you could design a new front end for a user’s music library.

Sleevenote was originally built as an iOS iTunes app, just with interactive tracklist art. I loved developing interactive art for the tracklist because it seemed the antithesis of “tasteful” UI design, which aside from the need for accessibility, had totally undermined the sort-of aesthetic mindset of navigating an album, the way the tracklist design itself would get across a vibe when trying to work out what the tracks were called and where the one you wanted to play was.

I was trying to have meetings via my music industry contacts about a way to differentiate purchased music from the streaming experience, but many had been put off by the expense and limitations of the discontinued iTunes LP product, and that most users were moving over to streaming.

A few years ago I met software developer Chris who would become my creative partner for other ventures. He was up for rebuilding Sleevenote and we made a wishlist of everything it should have; it should work with DSPs, it should have full booklet art, it should be open, it should be official.

The improvements to web APIs by this point meant we could build it as a web based platform as opposed to the restraints of an app, which was very liberating. So now Sleevenote can be used as a primary way to share a release, a multi platform player (Spotify, Apple Music and TIDAL), which shows full artwork and where possible can also link out to purchasing on Bandcamp.

We also experimented with making hardware in the form of a dedicated artwork focused portable music player, although we didn’t manage to get it off the ground it was a great experience and I still love the idea of it. I think someone like Nothing/Teenage Engineering would be a great place for a new portable music player niche audience to be created.

Full album art release pages can be created by labels and artists at create.sleevenote.com

P&S: Music NFTs are hot right now. You have the SuperCollector project — tell us about that.

Supercollector came from exploring incorporating NFTs into Sleevenote.

We shipped some integration but found that it gave Sleevenote too many main features, so decided to spin off a NFT specific brand.

I had experimented with releasing some 1/1s on Catalog, and had written a blog piece where I’d used the term “Supercollector” to describe who they were for, after seeing it written down I thought it made a good self-explanatory brand for a new era of music fandom.

The impetus to explore the music NFTs scene had come from working with Seattle-based founders CXY and Carl on what was their app Cardioid (now Music Nerd). They’d been determined to find ways to turn streaming listeners into more committed fans that supported artist’s careers, and when music NFTs came along they were very enthusiastic that we’d all look into building with them.

CXY has become a crucial supporter of our development since then.

Initially as Supercollector we’ve developed a feed that shows the latest collections from a bunch of platforms, showcasing the interoperability of music NFTs and how collectors can collect from multiple sources and still have unified collection, which is the really awesome feature of music NFTs.

Over the last 12 months, amongst all the debate about whether “music NFTs work” or not, it became apparent to us that’s it’s still so early, mainly because it hasn’t been easy for the average artist to try them out, but also because of the lack of support for traditional multi-track album and EP releases, the music NFT scene being single track centric so far.

We still believe that music NFT releases should be able at the track level, which has been a technical challenge, but in collaboration with blockchain protocol Decent, we’ve put together what we think is a very neat solution, adhering to blockchain and existing music NFT standards. We think is a great base-level tier for releasing music NFTs that are affordable, unlimited but also have the great features of NFTs (verifiable, tangible, interoperable — just more special than an mp3 download basically).

Essentially Supercollector Release is a service that creates releases containing unlimited open editions of tracks at $10+, with a very Bandcamp like ease-of-use for creators, and keeps individually collectible tracks associated with releases in the web3 ecosystem.

In pushing the paradigm that tracks are worth $10 instead of $1, we see it as as “Bandcamp x10”, a tier that can exist above Bandcamp, and below more valuable limited editions and 1/1s.

We’re weeks away from letting artists try out Supercollector Release. I’m super excited about it.

P&S: Shifting over to Web3, there’s also Music Nerd in your line-up. How is that going? What’s the latest?

Music Nerd is currently a “directory for web3” having evolved from an app called Cardioid, but also is more broadly a kind of umbrella identity for the manifesto of music tech enthusiasts CXY and Carl.

Music Nerd has a database connecting artists with their various online incarnations, we use it to get Twitter handles for artists and collectors on the Supercollector feed for example.

The intention is to provide a place for music fans to crowdsource useful data for new artists, even those choosing to release only in web3. It’s always been about providing context around music, getting to know artists to a deeper level, knowing more about the music, like a true nerd :)

P&S: Finally, there’s LIISTN. This is a relatively new project. How do you see this new platform developing?

The idea for LIISTN came directly from Cardioid, which in its app form would show you cards of socials for whichever artist was currently playing. An element I found really fun about Cardioid was when the song changed you sorta got “kicked out” from access to the artist. I thought this idea that “listening is access” was super interesting. Chris and I originally tried to build it as special messages that an artist could post for those listening, but decided that allowing listeners to talk amongst themselves could be more compelling.

The idea that you have to be listening, that if you pause you get booted out of the chat I think is such a strong angle.

I think there’s an important distinction between most other types of group listening whereby everyone has to be listening to the same feed, with LIISTN you just need to be listening to anything by that artist to chat with other fans, you can see what else others are listening to when they message, and can jump straight to the song they are playing.

LIISTN is certainly more of an experiment at the moment, while we’re so busy with Supercollector. It’s fairly evident that it needs some scale to truly work, but we have some ideas up our sleeves that might help some organic growth, which is always the dream building these products that you only need to tell a few people and it snowballs from there.

P&S: What are your thoughts on the overall business of ‘music streaming?’

So much to say but to keep it short: It’s incredible for discovery, but I think has a negative effect on the psychology of music taste and doesn’t provide enough hooks to create a meaningful identity as a music fan.

I believe that there’s a whole suite of super rewarding “ownership” experiences for music fans to come, and we’ll see streaming as a useful but smaller presence in a fan’s overall relationship with music.

P&S: What’s next for you with design? I imagine you have lots of other ideas as you also work on the projects discussed above.

I’m hoping that Supercollector Release is going to keep me very busy for a while.

My ideas are coming more as improvements for these specific product areas now, but yeah I love having ideas, being able to collaborate with people to make them a reality is the best.

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