An Update On The Coming Launch Of Neil Young’s PONO Service

If you’ve read Neil Young’s best-selling Waging Heavy Peace autobiography, you have an idea of how much effort and love has gone in to Young’s PONO music service. With this new format, Neil aims to improve the sound quality of audio tracks that has taken a big hit in the past decade with the popularity of heavily-compressed MP3 files. Earlier this month, Young posted an update about the status of PONO, which he’s hoping to launch in early 2014.

Here’s the complete text of Neil Young’s note on PONO:

To everyone who loves music –

I’m very happy to bring you some good news. All of us at Team PONO have been focused on getting everything right for our early 2014 launch of Pono.

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.

This music moves you. So you can feel. That’s why so many musicians are behind PonoMusic – this is important work that honors their art. This is the way they wanted you to hear their music.

PONO starts at the source: artist-approved studio masters we’ve been given special access to. Then we work with our brilliant partners at Meridian to unlock the richness of the artist’s music to you. There is nothing like hearing this music -and we are working hard to make that experience available to all music lovers, soon.

Our mission is also to make PONO just as accessible as any music you buy and listen to today. So we’ll be launching both the PONO portable player – an updated version of the one I showed on David Letterman’s program – and an online library, with all your favorite music available in PonoMusic quality. Everything you need to feel music anew.

Stay tuned for more updates. And be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest information. We hope you’ll try PONO when it comes your way, and that it brings you the soul of music.

Yours, for PonoMusic –
Neil Young

We’ll soon see just what kind of audio upgrade PONO provides and it will be interesting to see how quickly the format is adopted. With the Warner Music Group already aboard as the first major label to agree to remaster its catalog to the new format, PONO has a foot in the door.

[Hat Tip –Consequence Of Sound]