Focused on quality music and sound, listening bars are transforming nightlife

For a growing number of music lovers, a great night out has a very different look and feel these days. If you’re getting a round of drinks, you might return to your seated friends slaloming past candlelit tables, trying not to spill an orange wine from Sicily or a fizzy grenache. Your waiter brings sashimi, or pork belly, or chalk stream trout from the kitchen. Over at the DJ booth you’ll probably spot shelves of well-thumbed vinyl and a conspicuously chunky set of speakers. Whatever’s playing—Blue Note jazz, Japanese techno-pop, Guatemalan folk music—sounds extremely nice. 

In a struggling nightlife sector, the listening bar is a rare piece of good news. Official figures are hard to come by, but the trend towards vinyl records, high-fidelity sound, and upmarket drinks on a Friday night is anecdotally inescapable. In London alone, a flurry of new listening bars launched last year: Black Lacquer in Farringdon, Mad Cats in Shoreditch, Hausu in Peckham, The Marquee Moon in Stoke Newington, Space Talk in Central London, and Jazu in Deptford (relocated from a temporary spot in Peckham). This influx of venues adds to established spots like Behind This Wall and Brilliant Corners, which has opened a sister venue for live music, mu. Spiritland, another long standing venture in King’s Cross, plans to launch two new bars in Lisbon. So what’s going on? 

“People’s appetites are changing a little bit,” said Eugene Wild, who co-runs Marquee Moon, The Cause nightclub, and other London nightlife businesses. “When you think about the age demographic of the people coming to our bars, they tend to be mid-to-late 20s, they tend to have a little bit more disposable income, and they don’t necessarily want to be out at six in the morning at a club. But they still want to go out, listen to good music, and listen to DJs curate their evening. Obviously, having a great soundsystem and a great layout that’s designed well, the overall experience of a night; that’s probably what people want a bit more of now. You’ve still got your boozers and your pubs, and they’re all great. But if you want something a bit more refined, then you’d end up at a listening bar.”

To understand why listening bars are so in vogue, it helps to look to Japan, where venues known as ongaku kissaten (or “music café”) first emerged. As illustrated by a recent documentary, A Century In Sound, the history of kissa reaches back to the 1920s and arrived thanks to a unique set of historical circumstances. Nick Dwyer, the film’s co-director, has explained that kissas, initially specialising in classical music or swing, gained a foothold in the wake of Japan’s Meiji-era exposure to Western culture. Foreign music began to arrive, and Nippon Columbia started manufacturing gramophones. Coffee culture was also booming. But as the resulting Western-style cafés grew more popular—and boozier—things went awry.

“It created a moral panic,” said Dwyer. “They were playing dancing music, really loud. The women that worked at these places would often dress quite Western and sexily. It was short skirts, people drinking, and dancing—and even dancing was considered immoral behaviour. So to distinguish themselves from these unruly cafés, the kissaten was born. And the kissaten was somewhere that was more refined, and elegant—and it was a more sensible and distinguished way to enjoy coffee culture. That started to emerge in the late ’20s, and that was where the term kissaten really took off. The first ongaku kissa, which was Cafe Lion, opened in 1926, and it was the place you’d go to listen to music… it was quiet, focused on listening to records.” 

In the post-war period, added Dwyer, kissas became a lifeline for communities to get together as hi-fis and records became unaffordable for the average person. “Most kissas were destroyed during World War II,” he said, “and then in the postwar period, especially from the ’50s they just proliferated. [Most] small towns [by then] have a jazz kissa.”

One of the differences of the listening bar experience outside of Japan is that there is more talk, and it is more social. But at least some characteristics of ongaku kissa remain. The soundsystem and acoustic setup at a listening bar is often very good, and usually given far more attention than at your average club. And the dedication to vinyl is virtually absolute; I haven’t yet seen a CDJ at these sorts of venues in London, even if the format would not necessarily go against the way a few OG kissas go about things (a number of classical- and jazz-focused kissas play CDs). But more so than the technical specs of a rotary mixer or big Altec horns, listening bar owners like Bénédict Berna emphasise the importance of having a “clear vision” about lots of disparate elements. 

“It’s not just about having big speakers behind the bar,” said Berna, who co-runs Rhinoçéros in Berlin alongside his partner, Martina Carl. “You need a curated music selection, a deep, well-thought-out in-house record collection played with intentionality and knowledge. And a high-quality soundsystem; not necessarily the most expensive gear, but one that delivers musical clarity as intended by the artists and producers. And atmosphere! You need good lighting, a comfortable space, and a layout plus service that encourages listening. You definitely need respect for the music. The bar and team should create an environment where people come to listen, not just to drink and socialise. We have quite clear house rules about that.”

You could also argue, as the journalist and DJ Kate Hutchinson does, that listening bars encourage a unique kind of musical community engagement: a shared dialogue between the DJ and the audience that reflects the one-to-one intimacy that internet radio stations like NTS and Worldwide FM can foster. “[Listening bars] allow people who love music to go up to the DJ and say, ‘What was that last tune?’ I love that kind of stuff,” she said. “It’s the dialogue—[not unlike] internet radio—between the DJs and the chatrooms. It’s all part of the same wheelhouse to me. If you’re really into music, it’s a place where you can go talk to the DJ about what they’re playing and look at the record sleeves. From a community-building aspect, they’re providing an IRL space for this kind of exchange, which I really love.”

If clubbing is going through a generational decline, that’s not only a reflection of changing tastes. Tighter licensing restrictions, residential noise complaints, and high operating costs are taking their toll on nightclubs. But the growth of listening bars does seem to point to a shift away from up-all-night hedonism. As a recent data piece by the Financial Times made clear, nightclubs in global capitals like Barcelona and Dublin are now less likely to stay open till the small hours (this drift towards daytime events is part of a broader trend sometimes referred to as “soft clubbing“). Though a new NTIA report said that overall spending on the nightlife economy was up by 2.3% in 2024 from the previous year, it also points out a slowdown in that growth as people seek out what the report calls “fresh experiences.” 

“The sector is in a very, very difficult position,” said Michael Kill, the NTIA’s CEO, “but [people are] always looking for new opportunities, and listening bars are definitely an interesting one. When we talk about new experiences, first of all, drinking is becoming a thing of the past; 25% of people are drinking low or no-alcohol drinks. They’re looking at very different activities, things like competitive socialising”—karaoke, ping-pong bars, and so on. “[Listening bars] are  actually going after a market that isn’t catered for: the music fanatic.” When asked if listening bars might impose a dampening effect on nightclubs, Kill made the point that late-night venues are under threat from a wide range of more urgent issues, among them public safety concerns and inadequate late-night transport infrastructure. 

You could think of listening bars as the bricks-and-mortar presence of an audiophile culture that also encompasses selector-style DJing, internet radio, and formative deep-listening events like Colleen Murphy’s Classic Album Sundays. “All of this has funneled back into the clubs,” said Hutchinson. “You just have to look at an event like Giant Steps at the Bath House, which is taking this idea of the listening bar—i.e. deep appreciation for the music on a beautiful soundsystem—and putting that on the dance floor.” Hutchinson argued that listening bars encourage an eclecticism of taste that is filtering down through club culture. But as the craft of DJing disconnects from late-night dance floors—another case in point, viral street DJs like AG and SUAT—you might wonder whether nightclubs remain at risk of missing out. 

As Wild put it to me, there is a growing appetite for programming that extends beyond, say, drum & bass on a Friday night and house and techno on the Saturday. Likewise, in most listening bars you’ll come across a huge depth and variety of music: zouk, avant-pop, bossa nova, gospel, new wave and plenty else. These hard-to-find, hard-to-place records are a pendulum swing away from what Spotify calls Perfect Fit Content, or PFC—music that the platform itself commissions to fit into playlists called “Coffee Table Jazz” or “Mellow Lofi Morning.” One other thing you won’t find is thumping dance music. On a recent visit to a listening bar in London, I heard staff gossiping disapprovingly about a DJ who spent hours one Sunday playing UK garage to near-empty tables.

One of the successes of the listening bar is its conceptual flexibility. In Japan alone, as Dwyer noted, there are all kinds of music cafés. “There’s rock kissa, there’s tango kissa, there’s French chanson kissa,” he said; one of the listening bars he spotlights in A Century Of Sound is Cafe Nightingale, a place for noise and experimental music that, as its owner, Masaru Hatanaka, has put it, “most of the world doesn’t understand.” But the image that persists of listening bars is of the jazz kissa, which has been the subject of magazine spreads, photobooks, vlogs, Pinterest boards and TikToks; there is a nostalgic, forgotten-world quality to photos, like this one of Coltrane Coltrane in Tosu, that hold an obvious appeal. 

But Dwyer noted that the abundance of images like these create “a lot of misconceptions about the culture.” He added, “Often when you see people on social media that have taken photos of [jazz kissas], they’ll go to these places and say, ‘Look, can I take a photo?’ The owner will be like, ‘Sure, but don’t take a photo of any of my customers and don’t take a photo of me.’ So you often see empty rooms, a focus on speaker detail, and I think a lot of people have this idea that it’s a bit of a dying culture and that it’s just jazz, and it’s old men who are trying to relive their youth in the ’60s. But it’s not true—it’s every twist and turn of modern music of the 20th century.”

Pinning down the definition of a listening bar gets slippery for yet another reason. On the one hand, there are venues that take their Japanese lineage seriously. Berna, for one, said that Rhinoçéros is a homage to jazz kissas; it holds “listening sessions” in which guests are expected to be silent, and on the website they encourage “quiet conversation.” On the other hand, newer spots like Marquee Moon, formerly the home of a pub that had stood since the mid-19th-century, take an adaptable approach that recognises the reality of London nightlife. “We wanted to try… not necessarily a listening bar per se,” said Wild, “but a comfortable environment to have those drinks and have a lot of people talking to each other… It’s a bit more of a party than a traditional listening bar.”

Chee Shimizu, who runs the revered Organic Music record shop and DJs at Tokyo’s SHeLTeR, which is widely regarded as one of the world’s best listening bars, pointed out that there is room for both. “Some establishments prohibit conversation in order to concentrate on listening to music,” he said, “while others allow people to enjoy music while talking casually. I personally prefer the latter style; it’s nice to be able to listen to music and talk with people about it. It should be able to serve as a place where people can become more connected through the sharing of music. But if I want to immerse myself in listening to music carefully in silence, I would choose a place like the former.”

One of Dwyer’s concerns about the newly “hip” status of listening bars is that a growing number of venues are more interested in attracting customers than communities; to an investor with a hospitality portfolio, today’s listening bar is not so different from yesterday’s Prohibition-style speakeasy. “Look, I’ve never started a business, so who am I to cast judgement on anyone,” he said, “but all the places here in Japan, no one’s doing it for money. They’re all community places. They’re done out of love. The music and the records they play, and ensuring that the customers have the best experience of listening to that music, are the top priority. They’re not places to buy overpriced drinks. They’re not places for banter. There’s so many other bars [for that].”

Subcultures are in a deflationary spiral. Shared musical experiences among young people are mostly visual and ephemeral. If a bygone scene cycles back into popularity, it’s not emo, it’s “emo”—a whole algorithmic universe dislocated, then misquoted, by irony or nostalgia. As the writer Mireille Silcoff has noted, teenagers are immersed in “thin cultural planes that barely exist outside their devices.” And in the streaming age, it’s playlists, not scenes, that drive musical preference and experience. Some of the momentum around listening bars is undoubtedly mimetic and of-the-internet. But maybe that’s OK. A renewed enthusiasm for going out to places that foreground good music is useful for an industry projected to be nightclub-free by 2030, and essential for music lovers whose passions otherwise feel increasingly marginal as a cultural force. 

“I often think about the fact that podcasts and prestige television have usurped music as the thing that people talk about at dinner parties,” said Hutchinson. “Music is something that seems to be left in your 20s and 30s and people graduate to other forms of culture to obsess over and enthuse about. So listening bars offer this amazing opportunity to be able to appreciate the music again in a world where streaming has sort of flattened it into background music. Isn’t it wonderful that there are these spaces now that can engender or encourage conversation or discussion about music?”

Dwyer made an elegant analogy for the listening bars that prioritise music above all else. “In the same way that the movie theatre is where you go to watch a movie in the best possible conditions,” he said, “these places are like movie theaters for music.”