Who killed Pono? Inside Neil Young's digital music disaster

Just before 10pm on June 24, 2015 Donald Trump reached for his mobile phone and bashed out a tweet.

“A few weeks ago Neil Young came to my office looking for $$ on an audio deal and called me last week to go to his concert,” tweeted Trump. “Wow!”

The future President of the United States was taking aim at one of the great rockers of his generation. Yet this wasn’t a random outburst. It followed criticism by Young of Trump’s use of his 1989 anthem Rockin’ In The Free World at the June 17 press conference at which he had announced his run for the White House.

Trump was at the time achieving a reputation as a politician who used social media as a sledge-hammer against his foes. Still, his tweet, if typically pugilistic, nonetheless raised questions. Such as : why was Young, with an estimated net worth of $80 million, looking for money from a right-wing real estate mogul?

The answer can be summed up in a single word, “righteousness”. Or, to use its (very loose) Hawaiian translation, “Pono”.

Pono was the great late-career folly of Young, who this week returns to first principles with the release of a “lost” Seventies album, Homegrown.

Homegrown has been acclaimed as the best thing he’s done in years. That’s very different from the reception shown to Pono, a $399 music player which Young championed as saviour of the world’s eardrums from the tyranny of the hissy MP3 file.

He had unveiled Pono in 2014 with a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign which aimed to raise $800,000. In an accompanying video, rock stars such as Tom Petty, Elvis Costello and David Grohl lined up to warble the praises of the Toblerone-shaped Pono Player and its high resolution music.

“Wow…,” stuttered Beastie Boys/ Red Hot Chili Peppers producer Rick Rubin. “Amazing.” It was hard to tell if he’d listened to the player or been twacked over the head with one.

In just a few days the campaign shot past the $800,000 target. In the end it raised $6.5 million, making it one of the most successful Kickstarters ever. Alas, that was as cheery as it got for Pono. Amid wranglings with record labels and a poor reception from some (though not all) users, the company struggled from early on and was soon burning through money.

The cash was rapidly running out by 2015, by which time Young had raised the stakes by removing his music from Spotify and other streaming platforms (the catalogue would quietly return ahead of his 2016 LP Peace Trail).

This, according to Trump’s version of events, was also when Young called seeking a dig-out. He even Tweeted a photo of him and Young shaking hands.

“For the non believer, here is a photo of [Neil Young] in my office and his $$ request,” continued Trump. “Total hypocrite”

Young may at that stage have felt he was out of road. Since the Sixties he had gained, and perhaps cultivated, an image as rock's outstanding curmudgeon. But – and here he differed from equally crabby friend and sometime touring buddy Bob Dylan– there were certain subjects about which he was vocal and sincere.

One was the environment. Young famously had a 1959 Lincoln Continental converted into a fuel efficient hybrid, the celebrated LincVolt. The second was what he regarded as the atrocious sound quality offered by music players on iPhones and other personal devices. These used comparatively low-grade MP3 files and thus deprived the listener of the richer detailing offered by CDs and vinyl. So in 2012, in collaboration with Silicon Valley entrepreneur John Hamm, he formed Pono.

“The Pono movement brings music back to where it can be and restores the art form to what it could be,” Young said in a January 2015 public interview with Rolling Stone executive editor Nathan Brackett. The ultimate goal, he elaborated, was for “future generations[to] hear today’s classics in a way that is… representative of what the music really is… instead of having a museum full of MP3 clones”.

Young’s thoughts on the decline of consumer music quality, as shared with Brackett, were eccentric to put it mildly. He felt, for instance, that the DVD-Audio format flopped because it required complicated surround-sound technology rather than the traditional two speakers.

“Almost every house is run by a woman,” said Young, suggesting wives and girlfriends might not like their personal space cluttered with expensive kit. “'Okay, what are these boxes in my living room…?' The most simple basic screw-up. 'Come on, I’ve got nice furniture'.”

Pono was his solution. The idea was that it would play high definition lossless audio far higher in quality to that offered by MP3s. Of course, accessing the music brought its own headaches. Users could “rip” their CDs and upload the files onto the Pono Player, if they had the time and inclination. They could also purchase lossless audio using the Pono’s hard to navigate store-front – at a cost of $2.50 per song, compared to the Apple iTunes standard price of $1 and the $9.99 per month Spotify charged for all-you-can-eat streaming.

Pono users were essentially being asked to buy their favourite music all over again. For enthusiasts who’d ditched vinyl for CDs in the Eighties and then swapped their CDs for iTunes downloads, and then perhaps gone back to vinyl a second time, it was a big ask. Particularly given that the record labels were demanding a premium price for the high-end audio files – which Pono, lacking deep corporate pockets, felt obliged to pass to the consumer.

That’s assuming you could even access the files to begin with. Outside America, this was not straightforward. “PonoMusic did not get rights to distribute music outside of the US and this was made worse because finding any high-resolution downloadable FLAC [ lossless audio] files was extremely difficult for UK consumers at the time of Pono’s launch,” says Hi-Fi + editor Alan Sircom.

The other problem was that getting the most out of the Pono in terms of sound quality required further investment in high-spec tech.

“To add insult to injury, to hear it at its best required the use of balanced-operation headphones or in-ear monitors, and they were both expensive and almost impossible to obtain at the time, even from Pono’s own store,” continues Sircom. “Used with conventional headphones, Pono users often called it “underpowered” and reported a noticeable cut in treble performance and an ill-controlled ‘boomy’ bass.”

Grumblings about the Pono’s sound quality threatened to turn the company – and Young – into a laughing stock when the player was reviewed by New York Times’s David Pogue. He conducted blind tests on volunteers, where they listened to the same piece of music on a Pono Player and iPhone, using the same headphones. A majority reported the iPhone as having better sound quality.

“The results surprised even me,” wrote Pogue. “Whether wearing earbuds or expensive headphones, my test subjects usually thought that the iPhone playback sounded better than the Pono Player.

“Among those who could hear any difference, I asked how much difference there seemed to be. I wanted to see whether this was some astounding, worthwhile improvement or perhaps partly imagination,” wrote Pogue. “On average, my participants said that when they heard a difference at all, it was about 10 percent.”

Pogue put this to Pono and was surprised to receive a response from Young himself. “Of approximately 100 top-seed artists who compared Pono to low resolution MP3s,” he wrote, “all of them heard and felt the Pono difference, rewarding to the human senses, and is what Pono thinks you deserve to hear”.

The key phrase here was “low resolution” MP3s, which Pogue noted, were of inferior quality Apple iTunes files. These, he said, were “much better than the radically compressed MP3 files of 1998”. The implication was that Pono was pitching itself against the lowest quality audio standard, rather than the files music consumers listened to on their iPhones.

That the Pono Player was no design classic can’t have helped. It was shaped like an enormous Toblerone and came in any colour you wanted so long as it was banana yellow (though silver “signature” editions with the engraved epigraphs of Young and other rock stars were available at a premium).

“I think the “average punter” doesn't necessarily want or need a massively high-resolution media player (DAP) and most folk will be happy to listen to tunes on their phones,” says HiFi Pig editor Stuart Smith.

“I suppose the thinking goes for most people 'my phone plays my tunes, why would I bother to lug another hunk of metal around with me in my pocket?' Not that Pono was particularly friendly on that front either given its size and shape. With regards to good headphones, I would say they are a must-have if you are spending money on a high res DAP and associated high-res audio files. And so to get the best out of Pono you would have needed decent cans.”

The final blow came in 2016 when the company running Pono’s download store was bought by Apple. Which immediately shut it down. Young and his team faced having to build, from scratch, their own version of iTunes. This at a time when people had largely given up purchasing downloads in favour of streaming, anyway.

The situation was by now dire, with Pono’s financial reserves parlously depleted. It was around then, Trump claims, that Young reached out. We don’t know how the conversation went. Whatever transpired, it wasn’t enough to save Pono which is currently rocking out in the great gadget graveyard in the sky.

“It absolutely smashed its Kickstarter campaign, but despite all this, I have never, and I mean never seen one in the wild,” says Stuart Smith. “So, whilst it looked brilliant on paper and spreadsheets and it was reasonably priced, something wasn't right in PonoLand.

“Personally, I think there was confusion over what files it would play and whether you would be tied into yet another format where the owners called the shots price-wise and where content could be limited. I think this was a miscommunication on the part of Young's team as it actually played all the lossless formats that audiophiles could possibly want. I didn't buy one because of that last misconception,

Young publicly announced the end of the line for Pono in a statement in April 2017. In the same missive he revealed he would continue his mission with a new streaming offering Xstream (which offers high-end recordings from Young’s archive). He played a tiny but audible violin for himself in his remarks, indicating he had been personally hurt by claims Pono was charging too much for downloads.

“I had to put up with lots of criticism for the high cost of music delivered in the way all music should be provided, at full resolution and not hollowed out,” he said. “I had no control over the pricing, but I was the one that felt the criticism, because I was the face of it. And I pretty much agreed with the criticism. Music should not be priced this way.

“Last year when Omnifone, our download store partner, was bought and shut down with no notice by Apple, we began work with another company to build the same download store. But the more we worked on it, the more we realised how difficult it would be to recreate what we had and how costly it was to run it: to deliver the Pono promise, meaning you’d never have to buy the same album again if was released at a higher quality; the ability to access just high res music, and not the same performances at lower quality, and the ability to do special sales. Each of these features was expensive to implement.”

“Pono is Neil Young in DAP form,” says Stuart Smith of Hifi Pig. “It was quirky, visionary, ahead of the curve and yet doomed to be loved only by the folk on the fringes...I'm off to go buy one from eBay.”

He might want to save the £949 a limited edition “Metallica” Pono is going for at the moment (a “Beck” edition is just £249). “Sound is way too thin man. Not anywhere near natural,” a Pono punter wrote on the company’s Kickstarter page just last week. “Pono Player isn’t that good.”