Neil Young’s music has been with me for as long as I can remember. As a teen I would sneak out of the house to see the midnight showing of his Rust Never Sleeps movie. Since moving to California, I’d catch some of his unannounced local shows and regularly attend his annual Bridge School benefit concerts. My band Needle covered Helpless on our debut album. Neil Young‘s Pono Music was a high-resolution music store and music player, and he served as the company’s founder, face, and eventually its CEO. The Noise Room first wrote about the project, then still called PureTone, in Waging Heavy Peace. In an age of ear buds and streaming, it was fair to ask whether there was room for something like it, and whether Neil Young fans alone could become the sustainable customer base the product needed.
I started looking at my own transition from analog to digital to see whether Pono would have worked for me. When the iPod came out, I picked one up not long after. At the time, most of my vinyl records and cassette tapes were being replaced by CDs, and having all of my music in the palm of my hand was too good to pass up. Years later, as vinyl made its resurgence and more artists released music that way, I picked up a new turntable and pulled out my old records. It was a joy to hear that music again, and newer material started to grab my attention in ways I hadn’t heard before. Pono’s pitch, combining high quality sound with easy to use technology, was one I would have embraced. Below are the ideas I thought could have helped make that happen.
Content is King – From my understanding, music in the Pono ecosystem came from studio master quality digital recordings rather than being burned from an existing CD library. Beyond licensing master recordings from various labels, Pono needed to make it easy for new artists and studios to create and promote their work. Although Pono wasn’t a new audio file format, plugins or presets that integrated with major digital audio workstations such as Pro Tools and Logic would have helped studios of all sizes export and sell their audio through the Pono store.
Price Is No Object – At a list price of $399 for the player, with albums estimated between $14.99 and $24.99, Pono was not inexpensive, though that was arguably beside the point. Throughout the history of technology, people have paid more for quality, the same way Blu-ray players carried a premium over standard DVD players. Apple’s purchase of Beats by Dre was another example of how a company’s valuation can reflect its reputation for quality.
Socialize It – By utilizing the web and integrating a social aspect into the Pono player and store, music could have been shared and promoted easily. Apple had already stumbled with Ping, its short-lived music social network, so there was no need to reinvent the wheel. Broadcasting purchases or listening activity on Twitter and Facebook could have let Pono take advantage of existing networks and subscribers.
Maximize Storage – Some years earlier, I had talked with the CEO of eMusic, who showed me an MP3 player about the size of a video cassette that held roughly 100 albums at the time. Media players have since grown to hold thousands of albums and songs, or stream them from the web instead. According to Pono’s own materials, the player shipped with 128GB of storage, enough to hold between 800 and 5,000 tracks depending on file quality. Being able to access a complete catalog on one device, whether through local storage or the cloud, was table stakes.
Building a brand new music ecosystem from scratch was always going to be a big undertaking, but there was a real opening for something like Pono in the music industry at the time. Its Kickstarter campaign raised over $6 million, a real show of enthusiasm from music fans and audiophiles, though a passionate niche wasn’t enough on its own to sustain the business.
Pono ultimately didn’t survive. Its download store went offline within a couple of years of this piece, and Neil Young announced the end of the PonoPlayer itself not long after, citing high licensing costs from record labels as a major factor in its failure. The company never came back.
