How Neil Young plans to restore the quality of music

With five days left in their Kickstarter funding initiative, Neil Young and the PonoMusic team are now the third most funded campaign in Kickstarter history at $5.75 million as of today.  PonoMusic CEO John Hamm is thrilled about hitting the milestone. “This campaign has exceeded our expectations from the start. By taking the nontraditional crowdfunding approach, we have been able to unveil PonoMusic our way — directly to our customers. The PonoMusic Kickstarter campaign now has over 16,000 active backers and we’ve received over 5,000 comments, questions and suggestions on the site.”

Neil Young has been disappointed by the sound of his own music for more than 30 years. Back in 1982, Young listened to some of his songs on a CD for the first time and couldn’t help but “question what had happened” to the sound quality. CDs had just come to market that year and some, like Young, believed there was a noticeable drop in quality from vinyl and certainly from what was heard in the recording studio. That fidelity only worsened in the years that followed as the industry shifted to mp3 downloads and streaming music. The evolution, or devolution, of music formats weighed on him.