At this year's Dreamforce, Neil Young was on hand to talk about his latest venture, Pono Music. The idea is very simple: since the invention of digital sound, we've had to make compromises all along the way, from the master (whether recorded in digital or analog) to the listening device. But now that memory and storage are relatively inexpensive, there's little to no reason to be listening to MP3s anymore.
Neil Young's venture aims at achieving the following goals:
- Pulling the sound straight from the master recording, into a lossless format (FLAC) and making it available. Some recording artists already offer FLAC downloads, and Apple also has a lossless format (ALAC) that is not widely used. Pono has set up deals with all of the record companies as a distribution channel--the library is currently at 600,000 tracks and is steadily growing. The cost of a FLAC is slightly higher than a CD, but is on par with vinyl (I saw retail around $21, but I think it varies widely).
- Offering a digital player that is capable of handling all of that data and streaming it into good, quality sound. The preorder price for one is $400, they're only available in yellow, and won't be out until early 2015. Such sadness, but I know what I want for Yule this year.
- Putting together a community for audiophiles. So far, this is where they've been the most successful, having started as a kickstarter campaign, raising way more than their initial investment. Now Pono uses Salesforce to support its online community, so...now part of my day job is to keep Neil Young's audiophile community going (among other things).
Until I have one of those devices in my hands, I'm still listening to vinyl. I will probably be digitizing a lot of it, and possibly converting some CDs to lossless (just what I need, another hobby!). Hopefully Pono will transform music back to how it was originally envisioned.
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