Neil Young says venture-capital companies didn’t get his new music device Pono because they couldn’t “own it” so he has taken it to the people.
Young launched a Kickstarter campaign at SXSW in Austin, Tx for the high quality Pono music player and in the first four hours he raised $500,000 or half of his target.
“It’s about the music, real music. We want to move digital music into the 21st century and PonoMusic does that. We couldn’t be more excited – not for ourselves, but for those that are moved by what music means in their lives,” said Neil Young, founder and chairman of PonoMusic.
Pono is about “taking music forward”, Young told the audience at the SXSW music conference. He said he took the idea to record companies and presented the idea as “one of them”. He pointed out that through no fault of the consumer, technology and corporations have taken music backwards via MP3 players.
Young is developing Pono as an alternative to low quality downloads and streaming services. “There is nothing to listen to on a computer. It’s crap. Why don’t they make a computer that’s thick. That has some balls”, he said.
Music purchased from Pono will still play on other players. “We use flat files. You can play them on other devices,” said John Hamm, CEO of PonoMusic.”Our goal is to offer the highest quality digital music available from all the major labels and build the world’s best sounding, easy-to-use portable music player. We’ve achieved our goal and we are excited to launch our Kickstarter campaign to invite music lovers everywhere to join the PonoMusic community and reserve a PonoPlayer for their own enjoyment”
“The player is designed to play almost every format. The music you buy from Pono will be the highest quality available for that song”. If you choose you can add your iTunes library to Pono.
The PonoPlayer has 128GB of memory and can store from about 200 to 800 high-resolution digital-music songs, depending on the resolution and length of the original recording. Additional memory cards can be used to store and play different playlists and additional collections of music. The PonoPlayer will be sold at PonoMusic.com for $399 MSRP and is available for pre-order at a discount on our Kickstarter.
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