Neil Young’s PonoMusic Format Launches At Last
With its player on sale and download store opening its digital doors for business, the singer-songwriter’s crowd-funded "music listening revolution" is go .
PROMISING “A REVOLUTION in music listening”, Neil Young’s high-definition PonoMusic has opened for business. Having raised an initial $6.2m via a Kickstarter campaign last year, music for the new format is now available to buy via www.ponomusic.force.com with the cost of an album ranging from $17.99 up to $27.49. Individual tracks retail between $1.99 and $2.99.
“Pono means righteous. It is a Hawaiian word, the one, the pureness.”
Neil Young
The PonoPlayer itself is available for $399, either online (it ships for February) or at 80 shops in the US.
The initial music offering includes albums by Jack White, Wilco, The Clash, and, of course, Neil Young himself.
AC/DC’s Rock Or Bust, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Foo Fighters' Sonic Highways and Taylor Swift’s 1989 are among the new albums available, as are reissues of Led Zeppelin IV and Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes.
Samples of the high-end reformatting can be heard through the store before downloading.
“Pono means righteous. It is a Hawaiian word, the one, the pureness,” explains Young in Pono’s mission statement. “Finally, quality enters the listening space so that we can all hear and feel what the artists created, the way they heard and felt it.”
According to Young, the format will allow listeners to hear music as it was in the recording studio, explaining: “CDs and MP3s are derived from the original masters, and now, with the PonoPlayer, you can finally feel the master in all its glory, in its native resolution, CD quality or higher, the way the artist made it, exactly. That’s the beauty of Pono.”