Neil Young talks Pono at SXSW, raises over two million dollars in pledges

Neil Young spoke to an attentive crowd of music lovers yesterday, on the first day of SXSW’s music program, addressing the issues surrounding the sale of low-quality mp3s.

The music legend took to what one industry person termed ’MP3 bashing’ to promote his new product Pono, a high quality alternative to both the iTunes store and the (now virtually defunct) iPod. In the 24-hour period since Young’s keynote, Pono has raised over two million dollars through Kickstarter.

“When the MP3 came along, that’s when the recording industry really went into duress”, Young said. “That’s when all of the artists in the studios, all of the engineers and people who work behind the scenes… the recording studios, they started to die. This whole culture just started to fade away. It was because of the cheapening of the quality to a point it was practically unrecognisable.”

“Film, other areas – everything went up [in quality], but music went down. Music went to the bottom, and all these people lost their jobs. That’s the true disaster of all of this: All these people I’ve never met, but I love them anyway, all these people who supported our industry, all lost their jobs. It was collateral damage of the mp3.”

The idea behind Pono is that music lovers would be able to access the ’highest quality music in the world’ on their store, downloading it to a superior portable music player. Users would also be able to listen to their current CD and MP3 collection on it so as not to have to purchase yet another version of their favourite music. And it seems the investment industry isn’t convinced that punters would hand over their cash.

“There’s a reason it’s taken two years to get this off the ground – and it’s an interesting reason: Rescuing an artform is notsomething that’s of really a high consideration to too many people in the investment community.”

Young also spoke of the deals that were made in the industry buy-in to MP3 – and the words weren’t kind.

“The record companies could no longer decide how to market the records because they did some stupid deals. They made some very dumb deals with some very smart people.”

“They were convinced [by others] that the album had no value – only the individual tracks had value, that the rest was just filler… So as a guy that had been making records for many years already I was pissed off about that. Because I love making records. That’s what I do. I love every song on a record – I love every note. They meant something to me. They are a family of songs that tell a story about how I was feeling. They weren’t just filler.”

As a technically viable alternative, its results in quality are unquestionable. However it is yet to be seen if Pono is a commercially viable alternative to the MP3 – considering that portable music players are now a thing of the past, and that the Pono player is significantly bulkier than any current Apple product that stores music.

As music lovers, however, we can only hope that Pono finds its legs. You’ve got to give it to Young – he sure knows how to convert an audience:

“We’re selling shit – people were still buying it because they love music, but they are buying zeroxes of the Mona Lisa. We’re supposed to be preserving history – not 5% of the data. And 5% has become the standard of the world.”