Yesterday, Neil Young officially launched his high fidelity music service, Pono, at SXSW including specs and details of the PonoPlayer device.
We’ve already heard the Canadian music legend talk at length about how Pono will revolutionise the industry; that it will liberate the listener from the shackles of poor-quality audio and how hearing Pono “for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theater on a sun-filled day.”
But now we get the opportunity to hear other musicians sing Pono’s praises. And what musicians!
The Pono crowdfunding campaign has launched today on Kickstarter, and along with it a mightily impressive showreel of A-list musicians drawn deep from Young’s little black book, all offering testimonials as to the fidelity and quality of Pono’s sound.
“My drug of choice is now potent again,” says Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, who along with iconic figures like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, Elton John, Patti Smith, Jack White, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne, all praise Pono as “the best sound” to reach their musical ears in some time.
The impressive turnstile of endorsements also includes Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Arcade Fire, Mumford & Sons, Beck, The Black Crowes, My Morning Jacket, Sting, Jack White, Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, Dave Matthews, Gillian Welch, Kid Rock, legendary producer Rick Rubin, Young’s old bandmates David Crosby and Stephen Stills – the list just goes on.
A cynic might suggest that the 68-year-old has dipped into his considerable life’s savings to get such glowing reviews, but the sheer number of musicians on hand suggests that Young may really just be about to deliver the “sound of the future” as Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett describes it.
Neil Young has described his music service as a “high-resolution, studio-quality, cloud-based digital music ecosystem” that operates through an iTunes style online store, PonoMusic, and a portable music device, the triangular PonoPlayer, offering a bevy of tech-head stats that in essence delivers super-detailed ‘lossless’ audio.
Young is banking that once the general music consumer hears how Pono delivers audio quality far superior to the compressed, tinny mp3 formats they’ve become acclimatised to (through the long-standing dominance of iTunes and now, streaming music services), they’ll never turn back.
The musicians starring in the Pono Kickstarter video certainly won’t, each getting a test run with Pono audio (in some cases through the stereo system in Young’s own car) many saying the sound “equals vinyl or goes beyond that,” as Mike D of the Beastie Boys puts it, or gives them a visceral sensation. “That music made me feel good,” hums Norah Jones.
Details on the Pono have been trickling in ever since Young first revealed its existence on the Late Show With David Letterman back in 2012, but now consumers have the opportunity to peruse PonoMusic and the PonoPlayer in detail over at Kickstarter.
As well as offering merchandise, backers are being offered discounted pre-orders towards the PonoPlayer, which as previously reported, offers 128GB in memory, holding “about 100-500 high-resolution digital-music albums” and retail at US $399. There’s also a range of ‘Artist Signature Series’ editions of the portable player (featuring many of the talking heads in the A-list promo) on offer for early pledgers.
The Kickstarter campaign has already hit the ground running, raising over $600,000 from more than 2,0000 backers at the time of print, putting it clearly on track of reaching its $800,000 target and potentially within the first 24 hours of launch.
Around “three to five thousand albums” have reportedly already been converted to the new high-end Pono format after the service got the tick of approval from some music industry bigwigs, including major labels Warner, Universal, and Sony.
Along with the launch of Pono, March will also see Young release a brand new studio album, A Letter Home, described by the singer-songwriter as “one of the lowest-tech experiences I’ve ever had,” rumoured to be recorded at Jack White’s Third Man studios.
