Neil Young's PonoMusic hits $2M on Kickstarter in one day

Well, that didn't take long. Less than 24 hours after legendary rocker Neil Young launched a Kickstarter page for his long-talked-about Pono music service, the campaign surpassed its goal of $800,000.

Neil Young's PonoMusic hits $2M on Kickstarter in one day

As of this writing, the PonoMusic Kickstarter campaign  has more than $2 million in pledges from more than 6,200 backers.

One of the reasons this Kickstarter campaign blew through the roof is that music fans and sound aficionados are eagerly looking to get their hands on the Pono music player, or PonoPlayer. The player has been in development for years and will use the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) audio format, along with other high-resolution music formats.

"I've been hearing Neil talk about this for years and wasn't convinced that it would ever really come to fruition, so it's great to see this," Kickstarter backer Matt Metzger wrote .

Along with the PonoPlayer, Young is also launching PonoMusic, which is an online store for high-resolution music.

"PonoMusic is an end-to-end ecosystem for music lovers to get access to and enjoy their favorite music exactly as the artist created it, at the recording resolution they chose in the studio," the Kickstarter description reads.

Young has talked about revolutionizing MP3 sound quality for years. In 2012, he announced the PonoPlayer and showed off a prototype of the device on the Late Show with David Letterman. While the PonoPlayer's release has been delayed over the years, Young said last fall that it would finally debut in 2014.

The PonoPlayer is slated to ship to Kickstarter backers in October; the US release is also expected that month and is said to retail for $399.

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Rocker Neil Young challenging MP3s with new audio format

The famous musician has filed several trademarks related to a new high-definition MP3 alternative, reports Rolling Stone. The government could register the trademarks by the holidays.

Rocker Neil Young challenging MP3s with new audio format

Get ready, MP3s: Rocker Neil Young and his electric-powered Lincoln Continental are coming for you.

According to "Rolling Stone," Young has applied for a series of trademarks on what appears to be potential names for a new high-definition audio format that the musician is creating.

The project appears to be the result of Young's long-standing dissatisfaction with the quality of MP3s.

"They might sound like great song titles, but '21st Century Record Player,' 'Earth Storage,' and 'Thanks for Listening' aren't new Neil Young tunes," "the magazine wrote. "They're trademarks that the rocker recently filied with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office...and they indicate that Young is developing a high-resolution audio alternative to the MP3 format."

In patent office documents uncovered by "Rolling Stone," Young's application, first filed last June, points to six potential trademarks: 21st Century Record Player, Earth Storage, Thanks for Listening, Ivanhoe, Storage Shed, and SQS (Studio Quality Sound). The trademarks' description reads: "Online and retail store services featuring music and artistic performances, high resolution music downloadable from the internet, high resolutions discs featuring music and video, and pre-recorded digital media featuring audio and video recordings for storage and playback."

Young's publicist said that the star isn't ready to talk publicly about the project.

But it seems that in a press release about Young's memoir "Waging Heavy Peace" put out last year by Blue Rider Press, the beans about the potential new audio format may well have been spilled. After extolling the virtues of the musician's electric car, the LincVolt, the release goes on to talk about the new project, tentatively known as Pono.

"Young is also personally spearheading the development of Pono, a revolutionary new audio music system presenting the highest digital resolution possible, the studio quality sound that artists and producers heard when they created their original recordings," reads the release. "Young wants consumers to be able to take full advantage of Pono's cloud-based libraries of recordings by their favorite artists and, with Pono, enjoy a convenient music listening experience that is superior in sound quality to anything ever presented."

The upshot of such a new format, notes "Rolling Stone," is that "such a service would allow music fans to download audio files that sound like the studio recordings of the past, as opposed to the uber-compressed song files that are currently available at MP3 stores like iTunes and Amazon."

According to the Patent and Trademark Office documents, Young first filed for the trademarks on June 9, 2011, and as of March 23, 2012, they were ready to be published. "Rolling Stone" wrote that the trademark must be published for 30 days, during which challenges to the trademarks can be mounted. "If the trademarks face no opposition or snags," "Rolling Stone" wrote, "Young must then file documents detailing how he intends to use the trademarks, which the government could register as early as the holidays."

Though Young may well be pushing Pono on his own, it seems that he previously had hopes of coming up with a new kind of audio format in conjunction with the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs. In January, at the D: Dive into Media conference, Young laid into MP3 quality, dismissing the format for having just "5 percent of the data present in the original recording." He then said that the way to get to the remaining 95 percent would be "high-resolution" digital tracks of the same quality as that produced during the studio recording.

Clearly, boosting sound quality in digital recordings is one of Young's major interests. On a message posted in May 2011 on his Web site, he predicted the future was just a year away. "2012 will be the year that record companies release high-resolution audio," Young wrote. "This is huge for our industry. Since the advent of the CD, listeners have been deprived of the full experience of listening. With the introduction of MP3s via online music services, listeners were further deprived.

"The spirituality and soul of music is truly found when the sound engulfs you and that is just what 2012 will bring. It is a physical thing, a relief that you feel when you finally hear music the way artists and producers did when they created it in the studio. The sound engulfs you and your senses open up allowing you to truly feel the deep emotion in the music of some of our finest artists. From Frank Sinatra to the Black Keys, the feeling is there. This is what recording companies were born to give you and in 2012 they will deliver."

Now the question is: Has Young given up on the record companies and taken matters into his own hands?

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Pono Music - Where Your Soul Rediscovers Music

Pono's mission is to provide the best possible listening experience of your favorite digital music.

What is PonoMusic?

"Pono" is Hawaiian for righteous. What righteous means to our founder Neil Young is honoring the artist’s intention, and the soul of music. That’s why he’s been on a quest, for a few years now, to revive the magic that has been squeezed out of digital music. In the process of making music more convenient – easier to download, and more portable – we have sacrificed the emotional impact that only higher quality music can deliver. However, the world has changed in the last 10 years – technology has solved some of the underlying problems that forced that tradeoff. You no longer have to choose between quality and convenience when listening to music – you can have both. This is the fundamental idea behind PonoMusic.

Pono Music - Where Your Soul Rediscovers Music

First Edition PonoPlayers: Black & Yellow

Pono's mission is to provide the best possible listening experience of your favorite music. We want to be very clear that PonoMusic is not a new audio file format or standard. PonoMusic is an end-to-end ecosystem for music lovers to get access to and enjoy their favorite music exactly as the artist created it, at the recording resolution they chose in the studio. We offer PonoMusic customers the highest resolution digital music available. PonoMusic is more than just a high-resolution music store and player; it is a grassroots movement to keep the heart of music beating. PonoMusic aims to preserve the feeling, spirit, and emotion that the artists put in their original studio recordings.

We are pursuing this vision by building a system for the entire music listening experience – from the original master recordings to the PonoMusic.com Store to the portable PonoPlayer. So now you’ll hear the nuances, the soft touches, and the ends on the echo – the texture and the emotion of the music the artist worked so hard to create. 

Please see FAQ at the bottom of this page for answers to the most commonly asked questions. 

Why should you support our Kickstarter?

PonoMusic is about a lot of things, but first and foremost it’s about the connection between the artists and their fans – the music, and the people who can’t live without it. We see Kickstarter as a way to strengthen those bonds by letting musicians and music fans get behind the thing that matters most to all of us – the music itself.   

Our Kickstarter is about bringing creators and consumers together.  It is about the formation of a community that values the experience of listening to music the way the artists made it, at the highest quality they can obtain.

We also wanted to allow music fans to connect with their favorite artists in a special way through the campaign - we are offering limited edition Signature Series PonoPlayers from artists such as:

Pearl Jam, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Foo Fighters, Willie Nelson, Patti Smith, Arcade Fire, Beck, Dave Mathews Band, Herbie Hancock, Norah Jones, Lenny Kravitz, Pearl Jam, My Morning Jacket, and James Taylor and more coming!

These special edition PonoPlayers have laser-engraved signature of the artist, and ship to you pre-loaded with the artist's choice of their two favorite albums.  We will be adding additional limited edition Signature Series PonoPlayers throughout the campaign as more artists step forward - so keep watching our pledge levels on the right to see new artists as they become available.

Artist Signature Series: Neil Young

More about the PonoPlayer...

The PonoPlayer is a purpose-built device, designed by world-renowned audio engineers, to do one thing and one thing exceedingly well - let you hear high quality PonoMusic as close to its original recorded resolution as possible, and therefore, the original musical experience. 

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Your PonoPlayer works in much the same way as most other portable music devices. The PonoMusic App (for Mac or Windows PC) provides you access to the PonoMusic.comStore, where you can browse, search, purchase and download high-resolution music to your computer.  You then simply connect your PonoPlayer micro USB cable to your computer's USB port in order to sync your favorite music and playlists. Then you can enjoy your music on your PonoPlayer at the same quality level as the original recording.  The touchscreen LCD allows for easy “swipe” navigation between songs, albums, artists, genres, and playlists. It also allows you to change the settings in the player to suit your personal taste.

The PonoPlayer has two output jacks. The first is a normal mini-stereo output specially designed for headphones and is meant for personal listening. The second is a stereo mini-plug analog output specifically designed for listening on your home audio system, in your car, or with your Sonos Connect – so you can share the PonoMusic experience with your friends and family.

[First Edition Yellow PonoPlayer]

First Edition Yellow PonoPlayer

What do we consider to be high quality digital music?

Generally speaking, mp3 files have a bit rate of 192kbps or 256kbps.   These are highly compressed files and are much smaller in size than higher resolution music files.  The good news is that you can keep a lot of mp3 files in a small amount of storage on a portable player or mobile device.  The bad news is that they’ve lost a lot of the musical information that often reveals the most pleasant and satisfying aspects of the music. It is mostly that sense of realism, dynamic range, and detail that higher resolution recordings typically capture in a way that restores the emotion in the song.

On the “low end” of higher resolution music (CD lossless, 44.1kHz/16 bit), PonoMusic files have about 6 times more musical information than a typical mp3.  With ultra-high resolution recordings (192kHz/24 bit), the difference between a PonoMusic digital file and an mp3 is about 30 times more data from which your player reconstructs the “song”.   

The PonoMusic.com Store uses FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) audio format as its standard, for compatibility, although the PonoPlayer can play most popular high-res music formats from other sources. PonoMusic has a quality spectrum, ranging from really good to really great, depending on the quality of the available master recordings:       

CD lossless quality recordings: 1411 kbps (44.1 kHz/16 bit) FLAC files

High-resolution recordings: 2304 kbps (48 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files 

Higher-resolution recordings: 4608 kbps (96 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files

Ultra-high resolution recordings: 9216 kbps (192 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files    

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The Evolution of the PonoPlayer Design...

Over the three years of PonoPlayer development, we considered many different designs and concepts. One of the early ideas was to make an accessory for a smartphone that contained storage for the music tracks along with advanced audio electronics. The phone’s display would be used to navigate and play the songs, but with the songs would be stored in the accessory’s memory. A Bluetooth connection would communicate between the phone and the accessory to select and play the desired song. This design was dismissed, for now, because it was very complicated to use and required two devices to play music.   

We talked a lot about making the player thin, to snap onto the back of a phone so it could be carried as one unit. But that meant you’d need a different player design for each phone model, and we found that it was not possible to put some of the large audio components – required for the best performance – into a thin package.  This led us to design the accessory in the shape of a triangular “Toblerone” shaped chocolate bar.  It allowed us to use larger audio components and to separate them far enough apart to prevent electrical interference between the various subsystems. It also allowed us to use a large cylindrical battery that’s much more efficient than a flat battery.

Early PonoPlayer Prototypes

 It then became obvious that if we added a touch display, we could make the player completely self-contained.  It wouldn’t need to be tied to your phone and there would be no interruptions from an incoming call while you were enjoying your music. It would be the best playback device ever for listening to high quality digital music. We realized that music this good deserved a truly purpose built, dedicated device to enjoy it. There was no “Swiss Army knife” good enough for the music we wanted you to hear.   

This triangular shape also has additional benefits: it can be held upright for one-hand operation or it can sit flat on your desktop or home stereo system. The display automatically rotates depending on the orientation of the device. But the best thing about this shape is that we were able to include the best sounding audio components with absolutely no compromises. The PonoPlayer will certainly be recognizable on your desk as the unique product it is – the world’s best sounding portable digital music player.

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