A Conversation with Neil Young – HuffPost 4.7.14

Mike Ragogna: Neil, you’ve always been an archivist and audiophile, so your delivery system for higher quality sound–PonoMusic through the PonoPlayer–must be the culmination of everything you’ve wanted in a playback experience.

Neil Young: As far as musical quality goes, this is what I think people should be able to hear. It’s what we created in the studio. The player is capable of playing back anything that can be recorded today. It doesn’t need to be limited to a format, it’s not a format. CDs are a format, MP3s are a format. It’s a quality level and it’s a limitation, so we’ve eliminated it. We just get to whatever the artist makes and present that.

MR: It will still be in the digital realm, right?

NY: Yes.

MR: And it doesn’t matter how high the bit ratio is, it doesn’t matter that it’s over 96/24 or higher?

NY: Yeah, it could be 192, it doesn’t matter. This device will play it back immediately.

MR: You’ve spent some time with the PonoPlayer, and probably put your own catalog into it to make sure it’s living up to your expectations. What was your first reaction to hearing it, and how did people react when they heard this idea?

NY: Well, first of all, when I hear my own music on it, it’s a fantastic feeling to be able to listen to studio quality anywhere, to listen to it in earphones walking around in the world, to listen to it through my car which sounds amazing, and to listen to it while I’m traveling around looking at different things out the window and be able to hear the super-high quality music. It’s the way the twenty-first century should be. It fulfills the promise of technology in the twenty-first century to this point.

MR: Do you see the Pono evolving?

NY: I think that we’ve raised the bar to a point where people will now hear what the artists have created, so I think that the only limitation now is what the artist creates.

MR: Could one of the challenges be the education of the consumer, teaching people about the device?

NY: This device is one of the simplest devices known to man. It has every feature of operation, from the touchscreen and the sliding and scrolling and selecting and then it has a volume control and an on-off switch and that’s all it does. It doesn’t do anything else. You can’t phone your mom on it, you can’t close your garage door with it, you can’t turn your toaster on with it, you can’t heat your house with it, you can’t do any of those things because it’s a music player and that’s all it does. it does that one thing very, very well.

MR: Now obviously it would be nice if this took over the field, but with the way people have been listening to their music–wuth MP3 compression, with simple iTunes purchases–how do you get people to realize that if they listen to this high quality, they’ll be blown away?

NY: The only thing that you have to do is hear it. If you hear it, you hear what it is. Music lovers, when they hear it, they are completely captivated by it. They can’t believe it. It’s like a homerun for music lovers. If you love music, you love Pono because there’s nothing about music that Pono can’t give you; it gives you everything the artist gave you. How do you convert somebody who loves MP3s and has an iPhone full of them? They have to hear it. Once they hear it, the difference between where they are and where Pono is, is so vast that usually, they’re just completely blown away. Onhttp://www.Ponomusic.com, there are several videos of artists listening or having listened to and testifying about Pono and over the next couple of days, there are going to be testimonials from teenagers and twenty-somethings from Los Angeles and New York City and everywhere. We’re going to London…we’re going to be playing this there and videotaping people listening to it. Really, the answer is people listen to it and they go, “I’ve never heard anything like this. Where did this come from? Where can I get it? How come I’ve never heard it before? I’m hearing things I’ve never heard before in music that I’ve listened to my whole life and now it’s like I’m hearing it for the first time. What is this thing?” That’s what people are like when they hear it.

MR: Do you think something like this can replace or affect iTunes and other sites that deliver digital music? Would they take PonoMusic and the PonoPlayer into consideration and maybe change their own paradigms?

NY: Well, iTunes has an ecosystem, and their ecosystem is not compatible with this quality level, nor is their device, nor are the components in their device. Their model of commerce is not compatible with this. Whatever Apple does is what Apple does, and whatever they do to improve music is going to be good for music. Whatever Pono does to make people aware that there is an entirely new spectrum of music to listen to that they may have never heard before on the existing songs that they’ve been listening to their whole lives, now that the twenty-first century is here and the digital technology is capable of delivering and storing it, it’s a new world of possibilities.

MR: Beautiful. Neil, over the years, you’ve been one of the few artists who have been so verbal about wanting the highest quality delivery system for your music. Is that how Pono started?

NY: I am Pono. I just started it myself, it’s a startup. There are a group of great people who work with me, and that’s the company. We’ve been together for three years. We’ve gone through a couple of rounds of investors, and then it took us a long time to find the right technology partners and people that we could deal with and knew what our methods were. We were up against a lot of people who thought that there was no reason for us to be here and that music was already fine being sold on iTunes and it was working great and, “Why try to fix something that’s not broken?” We didn’t have a format but we didn’t want a format because formats all compromise the quality of music, and a format is not necessary in the twenty-first century. Not having a format means that investors have a hard time wrapping themselves around something when they don’t own something. This is like, “Okay, we’re Kleenex. We’re Kleenex and there are going to be other tissues, but we’re Kleenex and we make a great tissue. We think it’s the best tissue in the world, so we’re going to make it so good that everyone calls every tissue ‘Kleenex.'” All great music is Pono music. Pono is a Hawaiian word for righteous. Goodness.

MR: Where there moments along the line where you were just so excited about the concept and device that you just wanted to get it out there already?

NY: I’ve wanted to get it out there for a long time. We’ve hit plenty of bumps on the road trying to get it out. We’ve had to change partners, we’ve had to make changes in our team because we couldn’t come to good business decisions that worked for us, and we had people that were with us who were against the way we wanted to do it. We couldn’t make the compromises that they wanted, so we stopped dealing with them and started dealing with other people who wanted to do it without compromising the quality, without making concessions to make a format, without doing things that would enable others to own what we were doing. We think the only people who own it are the people who create it. That’s the artist. That’s what it’s about.

MR: I have a feeling one of the ways to get the word out on Pono is to introduce the technology to new artists, ones who are less married to what’s come before. Do you think that might be another way to do this?

NY: I’m not really concerned with selling it, I’m concerned with creating it. I think it sells itself. It’s not a typical product. It is something that you hear and you go, “Oh my God, I’ve never heard anything like that before in my life. Where can I get it? I want it. I don’t want to give it up, I don’t even want to give it back to you.” That’s what people say to me when we let them listen to it.

MR: I’m imagining that was the reaction when you introduced this to South By Southwest. It must have been overwhelming.

NY: It was, and it continues to be overwhelming. We’re headed to six million dollars, we started at eight-hundred thousand. We will blow through six million, and it’s possible that we may hit higher marks than that. But we can use all we can get, because what we’re trying to do is change the face of music, and that’s where all of this money goes.

MR: Mostly when I mentioned new artists I mean that they’d be open to starting their creations and perhaps back collections on it.

NY: New creators, when they create the music they make choices. They decide, “What’s the technology we’re using? What resolution are we going to record in? How many bits do we want to record in?” Whatever they decide, we play it back.

MR: Speaking of new artists, what advice do you have for new artists?

NY: Write songs. Write songs from the heart, play your music, make it matter. That’s all you can do.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne