Neil Young is set to take on iTunes, Spotify, Guvera and co. with a new high-resolution music service, which is designed to combat the compressed audio in MP3s.
NME reports that Young’s service, Pono, will offer a music download service, portable music players, and digital-to-analogue conversion technology.
According to Rolling Stone, the aim behind the service is to present songs as they first sounded when they were recorded.
Pono is mentioned prominently in his book Waging Heavy Peace, which is out this week.
Young explains that Pono will help to “save the sound of music”, and claims in the book that he had emailed Steve Jobs about Pono before the Apple founder died last October.
“I have consistently reached out to try to assist Apple with true audio quality, and I have even shared my high-resolution masters with them,” he writes, before stating that his service will “force iTunes to be better and to improve quality at a faster pace.”
Young has teamed up with Atlantic Records chairman Craig Kallman to create the project. Atlantic’s parent company, Warner Music Group, has already converted its catalogue of 8,000 albums to high-resolution sound, including those by two of their star clients Muse and The Black Keys.
