Neil Young Set to Launch PonoMusic
UPDATE: Pono Music reached its Kickstarter goal of $800,000 in just under 10 hours. The service, which is nearing $1.5 million in pledges, will be accepting funding until April 15.
As we mentioned earlier today, Neil Young will be a keynote speaker at SXSW on Tuesday, March 11. Now we have an better idea of what his subject matter will be.
According to a press release posted on a Computer Audiophile forum, Young is set to launch a high-quality digital music player and service called Pono. The legendary singer/songwriter is the founder and chairman of Pono, which is both an online music store (PonoMusic.com) and a playback device (PonoPlayer), Pitchfork reports. The PonoPlayer features a 128GB of memory and costs $399. Kickstarter will begin taking discounted pre-orders on March 15.
"It's about the music, real music. We want to move digital music into the 21st century and PonoMusic does that,” Young said.
As previously reported, Young has been developing this product for quite some time. Young wrote about Pono in his book Waging Heavy Peace and described the difference between an MP3 player and his device. "An MP3 has about five percent of the data that can be found in a PureTone master file,” adding that "Hearing Pono for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theatre on a sun-filled day."
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