027! Are we all audiophiles now?
The Jamaican soundsystem, once a radical tool of resistance and community, is now a recurring motif in luxury brand campaigns. Why?
I first toyed with writing this piece well over a year ago now, and for a few reasons ended up shelving it. But slowly and steadily, with nearly every week that passes, a new thing pops up on my timeline that piques my interest and keeps the line alive. Most recently, it was Valentino that tipped me over the edge:
“Valentino has opened a listening room with a crazy soundsystem.”
There’s undoubtedly something great about this. People caring about sound, about listening, and the experience of music outside of just artistry. That feels like a cultural win. But it’s also become impossible to ignore how easily that care gets flattened into aesthetics, and how rarely it seems to lead back to the cultures these gestures borrow from.
Is there a brand left on planet earth that doesn’t have a “custom soundsystem” at this point? Every few weeks, another example pops up: a fashion brand rolling out its custom speaker stack, a “sound room” added to a boutique, a product launch framed around “deep listening.” In the past year or so, I’ve seen Nike, Burberry, Adidas, Stone Island, Highsnobiety, Moncler and even Evian put a soundsystem front-and-centre in an ad campaign or runway show. Aimé Leon Dore has “sound rooms” in their flagship stores. Axel Arigato has made speakers out of recycled shoes. Louis Vuitton built a full stack out of sand. We have reached peak audiophilia. As Naomi Klein might say, the cool has officially been hunted.
From the booming vinyl market to Japanese-style listening bars popping up everywhere, to expensive over-ear headphones hitting the mainstream, audio luxury is firmly on the high street as an aspirational lifestyle indicator. The expensive hi-fi system sits in the upper echelons of these statement accessories, far out of the reaches of low-brow digital consumption. A grown-up signifier of cool and taste, it’s an elite way of demarcating we care about music, about quality, about sound.
The trend is backed up by artists, too. In a recent appearance on The Colbert Show, Doechii performs in front of a pair of Ojas-inspired horn speakers, while Tyler, The Creator’s latest video, “Stop Playing With Me” also features both Clipse and Klipsch.
Caring about high end hi-fi is by no means a new phenomenon, but was historically more the domain of the audio nerd. Derrick Gee made a video not so long ago listing the high-end audio systems in the homes of movie psychopaths, from Lydia Tar to Patrick Bateman. Something about the attention to detail and obsession is, at least in movie terms, akin to a pathology. Especially when you’re discussing Huey Lewis records!
But now, Derrick also notes “listening has become cool”. Audiophilia has taken a new turn. While the obsessive, solitary listener still exists, there’s a new, more public-facing version taking shape. The high end speaker market has gone full graphic design bro: sleek, aesthetic and Instagrammable. And in parallel, brand marketing has picked up on Jamaican soundsystem culture. This isn’t just high-end home hi-fi, it’s taking the silhouette of the Jamaican stack - like Stone Love, or Bass Odyssey — and re-positioning it. It’s the new final boss of audiophile culture.
Frankly I think there are some notable good reasons that this may have happened: more black and Caribbean people in creative teams (and let’s not underestimate the singular impact of Virgil Abloh and his audiophile protégé Devon Ojas) and more understanding and appreciation for sound system culture as a whole. But I thought it might also signify a few more interesting things about where music sits in culture, in advertising, and in our imaginations in 2025.
In the era of cultural fragmentation, artists are struggling to become household names, even with millions of fans. Brands are having to configure how to use the force of music, without paying through the nose for recognizable talent, risking their reputation (by hiring talent that could damage their brand), or losing relevance (by hiring talent that doesn’t make the splash they thought).
In this climate, music’s value in time (streaming, sales, digital consumption) may be steady. But its value in space (the physical, embodied experience of live shows) is hitting all-time highs. Beyoncé grossed $55 million from five nights of shows alone, and Oasis fans are projected to spend over $1 billion dollars on their reunion tour. As the live experience becomes a luxury commodity, brands are increasingly turning toward the idea of what music feels like instead. Where brands are struggling to sell products-qua-products, they have to sell values.
And the soundsystem is an idea that says a lot about values. After all, the stack is so deeply coded. Far beyond a slick speaker setup, the original Jamaican sound systems were mobile community centres: roving cultural institutions that brought music, news and identity to neighbourhoods. They were sites of sonic resistance, defying colonial power structures and uniting people in shared cultural space.
In many ways, using a branded soundsystem in real life is an encouragement of a commidified collective experience. It’s tapping into the post-online zeitgeist: “community”, “wellness”, and today’s biggest luxury: “logging off”. It’s the same reason many brands are setting up run clubs, or similar in-person experiences.
The copy for Valentino’s sound room reads: “Within a calming space, vinyl tracks create the ideal grounds for deep listening and quiet contemplation. Immerse yourself in a new dimension of listening, where silence, resonance, and presence converge”. It’s hard not to think of Jenny Odell’s quotation that “even the idea of leaving capitalism is something capitalism is now selling us.”
There are other things going on too: clubs are struggling to survive and, perhaps relatedly, people are seeking out softer, more sustainable ways to experience music - ones that don’t wreck their liver or their sleep schedule. Some are calling this “soft clubbing”: listening spaces, day parties, alcohol-free events. It’s a needed escape from the codependent relationship that the live music business has with the alcohol industry. One high end speaker retailer now pairs their active showroom with a tea ceremony. Sound is the new spa.
But when the soundsystem stack is used in a static branded image, or in stores where it never even turns on, it offers the brand an edge without even having to put a body in the space. They get to re-spatialize music, tapping into the feeling of liveness and presence, without having to actually participate in the cultural labour behind it. They can in theory develop grassroots appeal, without giving anything to those scenes. In the attention economy, it makes perfect sense. We want everything extracted and out-of-context, because we don’t have time for the full experience - we eat protein powder, watch snippets, and crave a musical mood, not the artist that made it. We stand in line for the Kusama exhibit just to get the photo. We want aesthetics, not participation. We are context orphans, and our sad little soundtrack is playing through the branded speaker stack.
It’s a tale as old as time, but one that feels incredibly real in 2025. Consumerism has suffocated real-people culture, extracting the surplus value of the human, to eliminate anything getting in the way of production and consumption. It’s transformed subculture into “cores”, turning experience into clickable goods and images. It’s got finely juiced down and homogenized into Explore Page core.
At its worst, using the soundsystem is an empty gesture that feels culturally askew, lest we say appropriative. At its best, it’s a place for curation to thrive - like 180 Studios, or Valentino’s pairing with Terraforma festival, it funds the craftsmen (like Devon Ojas or Friendly Pressure), and it allows people to have a high-end audio experience they may never get to experience otherwise. The more people who can experience the power of the sub billowing through them, the better.
In any case, perhaps it’s passé to even care about what brands are doing now. We are in a post-sellout world, after all. But if the soundsystem is now a luxury code, it’s worth asking what’s lost in translation. The Jamaican stack was once about making the street itself the venue, a place where music could be loud, collective, and politically alive. In 2025, the stack survives as a juiced-down moodboard object, a shorthand for quality and artistry, divorced from its rich human context. Maybe that’s the price of our post-subculture era.
The processed feel of music. The spectacle of the club without the club itself. The idea of the thing without the thing.
Excellent article ! It leaked me think of Baudrillard simulation and simulacre that explains that the reality is only lived through the representation of it. You pointed that very well and even more interesting since now we seem to be substituting sound by the ( visual and imaginative) representations of sound, which is quite dissonant since it is not of the same canal of perception we talk.