Neil Young plans Pono launch for next year

Neil Young has confirmed that Pono – his audio service which will provide listeners with downloads of high-resolution songs made to sound like their initial recordings – will finally launch next year.

In a post on his Facebook page yesterday [September 5], Young wrote, “I’m very happy to bring you some good news. All of us at Team PONO have been focused on getting everything right for our early 2014 launch of Pono.

“The simplest way to describe what we’ve accomplished is that we’ve liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality – as it was in the studio. So it has primal power.

“Hearing PONO for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theater on a sun-filled day. It takes you a second to adjust. Then you enter a bright reality, of wonderfully rendered detail.”

For the project, designed an an alternative to the compressed sound quality of traditional MP3s, Young has already struck a deal with his own label, Warner Music Group, and is reportedly also in talks with Universal Music Group and Sony Music about contributing remastered versions of their catalogues to Pono’s online library of songs.