Eleven, Then Fifteen

An interview with a Swedish newspaper, a number that went out of date before it was printed, and why a very small room still counts.

By rafi Mercer

The questions arrived with an apology attached. Jan Ekholm, an editor at Svenska Dagbladet in Stockholm, was sorry they had taken a while. There was no need. They were good questions, the kind that make you sit down properly rather than reply between other things, and I ended up writing more than he'd asked for.

He wanted to know how Tracks & Tales came about. Whether I'd been a regular in listening bars who decided to gather them into one guide. The honest answer is not quite. The bars were the doorway, not the destination.

It starts further back. I didn't read or write until my mid-teens. I just didn't see the point of it. Words were something other people seemed to need. I had sound. I learned the world by listening to it first, the way a room changed when a record went on, the way a voice carried before I understood what it was saying. A boy who wouldn't read probably looked like a problem. Looking back, it was the first part of the map.

Later I bought jazz for Virgin Megastores. I told Jan the truth about that too: I was handed the job partly because there was no one else to do it. But curiosity turned into something deeper, and it never really left. Later still there were the bars in New York, rooms where young and old, rich and poor, the cool and the ordinary sat together and the place only worked because all of them were there. Nobody performing. Everybody listening, drinking, talking, sharing. It was very human. I got engaged in New York. I still remember those rooms, and the sounds in them.

And underneath all of that, twenty-five years working in digital, watching what unlimited access does to music. It's an extraordinary gift. But left alone it turns everything into one thing: endless, weightless, always on, never quite heard.

When every record is available, no record feels chosen.

Jan asked which countries stand out. Japan, obviously. It's the source, not just the leader. But the more interesting story is what happens when the idea travels, and for a Swedish reader I gave him somewhere close to home: a small wine bar in Gamla Stan that doesn't call itself a listening bar at all, where the music is simply taken seriously. That's the idea travelling properly. The best rooms don't imitate Tokyo. They take the principle, sound first and attention first, and let the city shape the rest.

He asked whether jazz is, and always will be, the best music. No. The genre isn't the point. The album is. One black slab, two sides, twenty to thirty minutes each, and once you start, you stay. You can't skip or shuffle or scroll. You give yourself permission to listen. Jazz became the language of listening bars because it was made for exactly that, but a record by Gil Scott-Heron does the same thing if you let it. So does a Beatles record that sprawls across four sides and refuses to behave. The best music is whatever you're actually listening to, rather than having on.

He asked whether there's too much talking in Western listening bars compared to Japan. Sometimes. But I'd be careful about making silence the test. Japan's quiet comes from a culture that already values restraint in public space. You can talk and still be listening: lower voices, a pause when a track lands, someone leaning over to ask what's playing.

Volume isn't the problem. Attention is.

And he asked the question everyone asks now, whether listening bars have become too trendy. Some have. You see expensive speakers used as furniture, a wall of records nobody plays, a laptop running a playlist behind the bar. That was always going to happen to an idea built on authenticity. But the bars aren't the real story. They're the visible edge of something bigger, which I'd call listening culture. It's a feeling first and a movement second. Punk was a feeling before it had a name. So was rave.

Somewhere in my answers I wrote that the Listening Club has members in eleven countries.

It's fifteen now.

I want to be careful with that number, because it would be easy to make it sound like more than it is. The membership is small. Very small. If you put everyone in one place you would not need a large room. There's no hall, no stage, no queue around the block. It's one album a month, played in full on vinyl, on the last Sunday, and a handful of people in fifteen countries who have decided to give it their evening.

I can't overstate how small that is.

And I can't overstate what it means.

Because think about what those people are actually doing. Fifteen countries means fifteen different time zones' worth of evenings rearranged, fifteen different ideas of what a Sunday is for, and in each of them someone choosing to sit with a record they didn't pick and wouldn't have found on their own. Not a playlist. Not a clip. A whole album, start to finish, with the needle dropping in a room they'll never see and the music arriving in a room I'll never see.

Nobody is paid to be there. Nobody is required to stay. They stay anyway.

I've written before about the first five sessions, how the growth was gentle and the feedback unnervingly consistent. Fifteen countries is the same thing, just a little further across the map. It isn't growth in the way a dashboard means growth. It's more like weather. Something shifting slowly, in places you weren't watching, until one day you notice the air has changed.

That's what I tried to say to Jan at the end. One person reading for six minutes, or playing a whole side of a record, looks like nothing. Tracks & Tales has had something like 250,000 visitors from 170 countries in its first year, and each one of them on their own is a single quiet decision. But habits change cultures. Slowly, and then all at once.

The small rebellion was never going to be loud. It's a few people choosing to pay attention, in rooms nobody else can see, at the same time on the same Sunday. Every culture that mattered started like that.

This one just happens to be doing it with the volume down.

When the piece runs in Stockholm, it will say eleven.

By then, I hope, it will be wrong again.

Why does a very small Listening Club membership matter?

Because of what each member is choosing to do. Every one of them gives a whole evening to a single album played in full, on a record they didn't choose. Fifteen countries of people doing that, however few, is evidence that the appetite for deeper listening isn't local to London or Tokyo. It's a feeling turning up in places nobody predicted.

How does the Listening Club work?

Once a month, on the last Sunday, one album is played in full on vinyl, online and accessible from anywhere. There's no skipping and no commentary over the music. Members listen together from wherever they are, and the record is different every month, deliberately.

What is listening culture?

It's the wider shift behind the rise of listening bars: people wanting music to be the reason they're somewhere rather than the background to something else. It shows up in record shops, home listening setups, whole-album evenings and rooms built around sound. Like most cultures it began as a feeling before it had a name.

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