Like many other true musicians, Neil Young hates mp3s and other compressed audio file formats, that’s why the veteran has announced a much higher quality streaming product sold under the name PONO, which he will launch early next year. This is how he described the new service on Facebook:
‘The simplest way to describe what we’ve accomplished is that we’ve liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality – as it was in the studio. So it has primal power.’
‘Hearing PONO for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theater on a sun-filled day. It takes you a second to adjust. Then you enter a bright reality, of wonderfully rendered detail.’
He explains that PONO will go to the source, ‘artist-approved studio masters’, and will be accessible as any other music format thanks to the PONO portable player and an online library. To summarize, Young and his system want to enter into concurrence with iTunes and Amazon on the sole basis that the sound of their product will be hallelujah much better,… there will actually be no comparison from what I was able to read. But is that enough?
This brings two questions: Will any file be available in the PONO library? Will people buy them?
According to Rolling Stone, the company has made a deal with Warner Music Group and is in talks with Universal Music Group and Sony Music, but that’s a lot of files to re-master! I am certainly not an expert, but don’t other uncompressed audio (such as AIFF) formats already exist? And so why aren’t people using them? Because they are huge files and most people prefer shorter files like mp3s. Being able to load your iPod with thousands of songs is very convenient and most people aren’t ready to sacrifice this for a higher quality sound.
There is absolutely no doubt that PONO will offer much better quality files, but is this really what most people want? Most people do not listen to music at home, comfortably sitting on a couch. They listen to music on-the-go, while walking, running, shopping, and driving, they don’t care that much about quality because there is also some other street, car, background noise! Obviously, music purists and audiophiles will buy PONO, people who actually take time to sit down to listen to their record collection, but it isn’t the majority. Also studies show that many people can’t really tell the difference between different files, mp3s may be regarded as awful by experimented musicians, but most of us aren’t!
So PONO seems to be made for the old generation, when I observe kids around me, they listen to mp3s on their iPhones, sharing earplugs, they aren’t into high quality sound!… and anyway they don’t listen to files anymore since they are streaming Spotify.
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