Neil Young’s Pono to become a high-res streaming service

Neil Young is turning his two-year-old digital music service Pono into a streaming service. But there is no specific date as to when that will happen.

He revealed in a Rolling Stone magazine podcast that Pono streaming would first be aimed at smartphones – despite commentators pointing out that iPhone’s internal chips are not currently compatible with Pono’s high-quality sound.

“We’re pushing towards getting a presence in phones,” the veteran songwriter and performer confirmed. He is working with an unnamed Singapore-based company to ensure that Pono’s audio quality is maintained.

Young is obsessed with how digital music services fail to capture the sound quality of records.

It was why the Canadian music icon launched the hi-res Pono (Hawaiian for “proper”) in January 2015 as a digital music player and download store in the first place. He successfully crowd-sourced $6 million to start the venture.

Its built-in, triangular-shaped players in particular were “designed and engineered in a ‘no-compromise’ fashion to allow consumers to experience studio master-quality digital music at the highest audio fidelity possible, bringing the true emotion and detail of the music, the way the artist recorded it, to life.”

In July, Young pulled all his music from the major services for this very reason.

He explained, “It’s about sound quality. I don’t need my music to be devalued by the worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution. I don’t feel right allowing this to be sold to my fans. It’s bad for my music.”

But Pono’s move to streaming could face the same problem as Jay-Z’s Tidal – which set out as a high-res service on the assumption that there were enough music fans who would pay up to $20 a month to hear their music in clear quality.

Tidal’s slow growth shows that is not the case. Young says that Pono will offer a quality that is six times that of Tidal and 30-100 times more than Spotify.

It will certainly be an interesting experiment for Young whos unconventional life and music career has been comprised of a significant amount of risk taking.