Roger Fingas
Folk/rock artist Neil Young's back catalog has returned to streaming music services including Apple Music, Deezer, and Spotify, a report noted on Friday, a little over a year after the musician declared a moratorium over audio quality issues.
Young actually allowed his music on one service — Tidal — this April, Music Ally observed. While Tidal has a relatively small share of the on-demand streaming market, it does offer a unique "HiFi" tier which streams in lossless quality for people with enough bandwidth.
In July 2015 Young claimed that streaming had "ended" for him, since it offered "the worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution."
Apart from his music Young is famous for his Pono brand, including the PonoPlayer and the PonoMusic download service. Both are geared towards maximum audio quality — PonoMusic, however, has been offline since July, after its platform provider Omnifone was acquired. The buyer was initially suspected to be Apple, but rumors quickly disputed that notion.
The drop in income could help explain the sudden change in policy. Young has also softened his position on iTunes downloads though, allowing his live album Earth to be distributed that way despite claiming in April that it "does not fit" there since it "breaks all their [Apple's] rules" and "couldn't all really be heard that way anyway."
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33 Comments
I gotsta pay da bills
How many Pono players did he end up selling I wonder....
Streaming is worse that AM radio?
Pono went up in flames.
Pono was an admirable effort for the right reasons, but was an ugly, implausibly shaped player with a terrible name lacking the right ecosystem infrastructure. I love Neil Young and his brilliant catalogue of music, but this player felt wrong from first blush. Eventually existing services will get the quality the likes of Young require. I do laud his efforts to bring attention to youth how important good quality files and the right technology are for the music listening experience.
Perhaps what seals the fate of Pono though is in 2016 few to no people want a single function portable music device—irrespective of cost, name, shape or ecosystem.