Neil Young begins work on new file format and music service

There are certain things in this world that were clearly made for audiophiles: Beats headphones, vinyl-to-MP3 record players, and the 160-Gigabyte iPod. Musician Neil Young may soon be able to add to that list in the form of a new audio-file format that promises studio-quality sound at a reasonable file size that can be downloaded off the Internet.

The format, currently under six trademarked names including “21st Century Record Player,” “Earth Storage” and “Thanks for Listening,” according to Rolling Stone magazine, won’t be available for some time yet. Young applied for trademarks last June, and now must wait aproximately a year’s worth of paperwork before the trademark is accepted.

In a press release from Penguin Group, the company publishing Young’s upcoming memoir, the file-format was being described as being a part of a cloud-based service from which users can download the files.

The release stated, “Young is… personally spearheading the development of Pono, a revolutionary new audio music system presenting the highest digital resolution possible, the studio quality sound that artists and producers heard when they created their original recordings. Young wants consumers to be able to take full advantage of Pono’s cloud-based libraries of recordings by their favorite artists and, with Pono, enjoy a convenient music listening experience that is superior in sound quality to anything ever presented.”

Rolling Stone also links to the paperwork Young filed last year, where he describes the service as “Audio and video recordings featuring music and artistic performances; high resolution music downloadable from the internet… Online and retail store services featuring music and artistic performances… high resolutions discs featuring music and video, and pre-recorded digital media featuring audio and video recordings for storage and playback.”

In an interview with MTV in January, Young said, “I’m finding that I have a little bit of trouble with the quality of the sound of music today…I don’t like it. It just makes me angry. Not the quality of the music, but we’re in the 21st century and we have the worst sound that we’ve ever had.”

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