Good going Neil Young! He recently targeted $800,000 in crowdfunding for his Kickstarter Pono digital music player, and in just one day, funds shot well over 2 million. Young is claiming Pono to be “an iPod killer”, an MP3 killer; basically promising to combat any future of poor audio quality, something that, in his eyes, we are far too used to. In a talk at this years SXSW, Young wanted to discuss the importance of the musical listening experience. He wants to change the norm of “CD quality” sound to something much more organic; as it originates in a musical studio. The PonoPlayer will ditch the MP3 in favor of FLAC files.

Without being format specific, Pono is build around the notion of originated sound from the actual musician. We’re talking super high-quality digital files. If you’re anything like Neil Young, you enjoy listening to music nice-n-loud. During his SXSW speech he stated “I love to listen loud. That’s what it’s all about, really for me. I like to take whatever it is to the limit. When I started doing that with these machines, it started to hurt, and I couldn’t do it for very long, so the part of the record-making experience that I used to enjoy became painful”. He continued, “Then time went by, and I got some better machines. But they weren’t really that much better. And then the MP3 came along, and that’s when the recording industry really went into duress”.

Neil Young truly believes we are being deprived when it comes to music, and that's how Pono was conceived. Pono plays back what the artist (or producer) in the studio did from scratch; with no format, and no rules. Hawaiian for “righteous”, Pono means no more choosing between quality and convenience when enjoying music time. The fundamentals of these two things are what make PonoMusic’s mission. In order to pursue the vision of preserving “feeling, spirit, and emotion that the artists put in their original studio recordings”, they are building a system for the entire music listening experience by providing listeners to original master recordings. These are available via the PonoMusic.com Store, and of course the portable PonoPlayer.

Young is doing a lot by bringing this to Kickstarter. He truly believes in hearing the subtle nuances, echoes, and emotional texture of audio; and if anyone wants to enhance the connection between artist and fan, it’s a musician like him. Currently, most MP3 files have bit rates of 192kbps, or 256kbps. This is quite small. It’s limited because of the file compression that allows for so many songs to be squashed onto a single device. Pono is going to support high resolution files, running anywhere from 44.1kHz/16 bit, to 192kHz/24 bit (which is 6 to 30 times as much information as a typical MP3). Finally, through the campaign is a limited edition Signature Series of music from artists such as Tom Petty, Foo Fighters, Willie Nelson, to Pearl Jam; with more to come. So, the Pono business model is already a successful one, raising around $700 per minute. That is the fastest to 7 figures of any Kickstarter campaign thus far.