Listening to everything, knowing nothing.

Promise every song ever written for a few pounds a month, scale it to millions of people, and the listeners don’t get rich. Neither do the artists. The platforms do, along with the major labels and the investors who own pieces of them.

Music has always been fought over. Labels, promoters and rights holders have always decided what it’s worth, and even when a CD cost ten pounds, only a sliver reached the person who made it. Streaming poured petrol on that fire. The money now pools around a handful of superstars, while artists making genuinely important work keep day jobs, or give up.

I know a jazz pianist who has played on more records than most people will ever own. These days he writes software for a living. I’m interviewing him for the first issue of our magazine.

Think about what a record is. Someone takes their struggles and their joys, whole years of their life, and distils them into something that can reach a stranger. A system built to maximise hours played then prices each listen at a fraction of a penny.

Listeners paid too. When everything is always available, nothing has to matter, because there’s always more. Music became decoration: the thing we put on to get through the work, the commute, the day. Music that helps you focus is fine, and it’s one of the many things music can do. But fewer of us sit down with a record and let it reach us. The feed was never built for that. It was built to keep the tap running, because whoever owns the tap keeps the profit.

Now the tap is filling with music nobody made. Machines churn out an imitation of the background noise the feed taught us to accept, and it’s sold to us as the future. It erases the idea that music is art at all. We should refuse it.

synff is an attempt to slow down: to give music the attention it deserves, and to capture the detail of what makes your taste yours.

It doesn’t watch what you play. It reads how critics and writers have described records, what they felt and what they argued about, and it follows the threads between artists. Then it weighs all of that against the artists you keep coming back to and the records you own.

When you’re ready, you ask for a Drop: six albums, each with a reason it found you. Take as long as you like with them. Afterwards you reflect on what landed, what didn’t and what you bought, and that shapes what comes next. Over time your taste becomes something you can see, and something you can finally put into words.

I spent years certain the Arctic Monkeys had nothing to offer me. I’d written them off and never looked back. Then synff handed me The Car, a record that leans towards jazz and cabaret, and I couldn’t stop playing it. It did the same with Osees, a punk band, and I have never been a punk guy. Nothing about how either band sounds would put them near my taste. What connected them to me was how the people who love those records describe the way they feel. Both are on my shelf now, on vinyl.

Helping people hear themselves in music again is where this starts. It isn’t where it ends.

Next comes a printed magazine: something physical you can hold, made with people who write about music and have something to say. It will make room for new voices and serious critical writing and, if you want one, a chapter about you: how you’ve listened this year and what you’ve learnt about yourself. Supporter membership includes it.

After that come the artists. Right now an artist needs a following to build a following, and every direct-to-fan tool assumes the audience is already there. synff is built to find the listeners a record belongs with. We want to open the platform to artists, help them release their music and stay independent, and connect them directly with the people who love their work, or would if they heard it. No gatekeeper in the middle deciding what it’s worth.

I was part of the rave scene in South Africa, and I’ve rarely felt so connected to anything. That kind of belonging is getting harder to find, and I think people are desperate for it. Music can give it back if we give it our attention again.