~Music

Felt-Tip Ink Dries, the Scroll Wheel Still Clicks

In 1976, Mark Perry made a punk fanzine on a children's typewriter and proved the music press was guarding an unlocked door. Fifty years later, a hundred-dollar MP3 player with a scroll wheel picks the same fight: who gets to stand between you and the music, and what do they charge you to hear it?

Photo by Rich Laxa / Unsplash

Mark Perry started a magazine on a children's typewriter. "I had a children's typewriter plus a felt-tip pen," he said later, as uDiscover Music reports, "so that's why the first issue is how it is." That was Sniffin' Glue, the British punk fanzine that hit the street in July 1976 and burned out a year and 12 issues later. Cheap, fast, and ugly on purpose.

Fifty years on, somebody's selling a zinc-alloy music player with a scroll wheel and real buttons. The Surfans F20 plays the files you already own and nothing else. Hold it next to a streaming subscription and it looks like a toy. Hold it next to Perry's typewriter and it looks like a question: who gets to stand between you and the music?

The Glue and the Typewriter

Start with the name. Perry lifted it from the Ramones, "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue," Louder reports. The same piece says the Ramones' debut sold about 6,000 copies. Six thousand. Keep that number in your pocket. The record that rewired a genre barely moved off the rack, and the kids who heard it started bands and zines anyway.

The zine taught one lesson, and taught it loud. The Punk Journey history of the Melbourne scene says Sniffin' Glue "demonstrated that anyone could easily, cheaply and quickly produce a fanzine." The Encyclopedia of Design files it as a key document in the history of DIY graphic design. If a 19-year-old bank clerk with a children's typewriter could publish, the glossy music press had spent years guarding a door nobody had bothered to lock.

Perry would hate this paragraph. Gimmie Zine's recent interview opens by noting few people embody punk's original spirit more than Perry, "even if he'd probably roll his eyes at the suggestion." The headline carries his verdict: "That's the worst thing of all, for things to become boring and cliché." Stick that on this article as a warning label. Turn a zinc-alloy gadget into a holy relic and I'm committing the exact sin he's naming.

What the Little Box Is

The first MP3 players ran on a dumb, beautiful deal. You had files. The box played them. Nobody sat in the middle metering your listening, at least for the files you ripped yourself.

Streaming turned music into a rental. You hold nothing. Your library lives on somebody's server under somebody's terms, and the playlist shows up pre-chewed. An MP3 player talks back: this is yours, it runs with no wifi and no login, and nobody else gets a vote.

The hardware makes the same case. Creative Bloq calls the F20 "both retro and cutting edge," a durable player built around a zinc alloy chassis, a physical scroll wheel, and physical face buttons. Your thumb finds the next song by feel, with no screen asking what you're in the mood for. Anyone who has stabbed at a touchscreen with cold hands knows why people want that back.

The Comeback, With the Numbers on the Table

Even the tech press forgot these things existed. TechRadar opened its 2026 buying guide by admitting that finding a good MP3 player "can be a struggle, especially if it's a device you haven't thought about over the last decade or so." This from an outlet that has kept the guide alive for years. When the people covering a category concede their own readers stopped thinking about it, you know how far it fell.

Here's where the hype merchants want you to stop reading. Creative Bloq talks up a 2026 revival in dedicated players and offline libraries. Ask for a number and you get a shrug. The receipts that do exist come out of the record bins. Tom's Hardware, working from RIAA's mid-year report, says US physical music revenue climbed 25.9% in the first half of 2026: vinyl up 17.7%, CDs up 58.6%. T3, citing Luminate, counts 16.3 million CDs sold over the same stretch, up 16%.

Fifty-eight percent and sixteen percent. Same discs, two rulers. RIAA measures dollars. Luminate counts units. Both point up, and neither one tells you how many people have walked out on streaming.

Then T3 drops the detail that should sober everybody up. Citing Luminate again, it says Gen Z and millennials are helping drive the CD boom, and about half of those younger buyers don't own a CD player. Half. A chunk of this revival is collecting, and the numbers can't tell you how big a chunk.

The mood has shifted. People pay for things they can hold, and a retro music player now gets covered as a consumer story. How many have switched, on discs or on players, nobody can say yet.

A CD and an MP3 player are different animals. One is a disc you buy at the store, the other a box for your own files. They share one thing: ownership. You paid for it, it's in your hand, and nobody can reach into your bag and rewrite the terms.

The Rebellion Is Real. So Is the Gift Shop.

Cards on the table. I distrust the streaming platforms, I love physical media, and I think a lot of modern music lacks grit. That's my bias, and I'll own it. Plenty of people love streaming for a good reason: a teenager in a small town can hear anything ever recorded for the price of a pizza. That counts for something.

The counter-hype counts too. Creative Bloq's F20 write-up is a deal post with a discount in the headline. Retro is a marketing category, and a nostalgia gadget can be as slick as anything on a mall shelf. Perry's felt-tip headlines came out of whatever sat in the drawer. A modern player sold as "retro" comes out of a design brief. The distance between that drawer and that brief is the whole story.

Still, a style can carry a choice. Buy a hundred-dollar player, load it with files you own, walk out the door with no subscription. Small act. Real one. Perry proved the gatekeepers were optional with a typewriter, and by his count to Hero Magazine, hundreds of zines appeared within about six months.

Line the typewriter up next to the scroll wheel and the overlap is plain.

Sniffin' Glue took publishing from the people who owned the presses and handed it to anybody with a pen. The MP3 player, in its first life and now its second, takes listening from the people who own the catalog and hands it back to the person holding the box. Both ask one question: who decides what you hear, and what do they charge you to hear it?

Both are fragile, too, and the nostalgia crowd skips that part. Sniffin' Glue lasted about a year. Perry named the danger in that headline: things going "boring and cliché." The little players face the same rot. Turn them into a lifestyle accessory with a nice case and no attitude, and they become one more thing to dust.

The rebellion lives in what you load. Fill the F20 with the demo your friend's band handed you after the set, the record no streaming service carries, the songs you recorded yourself. Then it's a typewriter. Fill it with the same forty songs every playlist already pushes, and you bought a nice case. That choice hasn't changed since a kid with a children's typewriter and a felt-tip pen put out issue one and kept going.