According to NME, Neil Young claimed that record labels killed his streaming music service Pono, by charging too much. Young launched Pono in 2014, after raising $6.2 million in a Kickstarter campaign. Young was aiming to “save the sound of music,” with his portable digital music player, and music streaming service.
Despite Young’s grand vision for the startup, Pono didn’t achieve any commercial success, and the company’s storefront shutdown in July 2016.
Young has shared new details on the failure of Pono. In an interview with the Tribune, he said: “The record labels killed it…. They killed it by insisting on charging two to three times as much for the high-res files as for MP3s, why would anybody pay three times as much?”
“It’s my feeling that all music should cost the same,” he added. “The [high-resolution] file doesn’t cost any more to transfer. And today with streaming, you don’t have the problem [of unauthorized file sharing]. Who wants to copy something if you can stream it?
“The record companies, by charging three times as much for hi-res music as they charge for regular music, they’ve killed hi-res music, It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“There’s nothing stopping anybody else from doing this,” He added. “The record companies are in the way with the high prices. There should be hi-res streaming services everywhere.”
Last year, Young tried to relaunch Pono under the name of XStream. His vision was to launch “an adaptive streaming service that changes with available bandwidth” for “complete high-resolution playback.”
Young later shared his insight on Pono’s community page. He wrote: “I’m still trying to make the case for bringing you the best music possible, at a reasonable price, the same message we brought to you five years ago. I don’t know whether we will succeed, but it’s still as important to us as it ever was.”
“We began work with another company to build the same download store. But the more we worked on it, the more we realized how difficult it would be to recreate what we had and how costly it was to run it,”
He explained that ‘just bringing back the store was not enough,’ and even though there were “dedicated audience” for Pono, he wasn’t able to justify the subscription fee. “When it comes to high-res, the record industry is still broken.”
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