This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Digital Education & Events
Neil Young to launch Pono at SXSW
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 27 January 2014
Neil Young’s long-awaited high-audio-quality digital music service Pono is set to launch at South By Southwest in March. The news was revealed during a speech Young gave at a pre-Grammy event last week staged by the producer wing of the Recording Academy in the singer songwriter’s honour.
According to Hypebot, Young said: “Being impressed by something, and how cool it is, and how sharp it is, and how snappy it is, is one thing, and that translates into almost any media. But when you’re singing something very soulful from your heart, and the echo is perfect and everything’s great and you’re using maybe an acoustic chamber and everything sounds great, and then you listen to it and you love it, but you hear it somewhere else and it’s gone – that’s terrible”.
He went on: “We don’t like that. Not many of us like that, we’re not happy about it. So we’re trying to change that, and we’re trying to make it better. We’re trying to make music sound technically better, and that’s what I want to do. So we have a player that plays whatever the musicians made digitally, and that’s going to come out. We’re announcing that at SXSW, we’re introducing it, it’s called Pono, and that’s my commercial, thank you very much”.