On Tuesday, March 11th, the Canadian singer-songwriter and
musician Neil Young has started a Kickstarter Campagin to raise $800,000 for
his PonoMusic project. Within the first 24 hours his project raised over
$1,000,000, and within the first 48 hours it raised over $2,000,000. The success of the campaign, and even more the product inspired me to write about it in my blog post.
What is this product and why is this Kickstarter campaign so successful? The PonoMusic
project is about technology, which helps to bring original music sound from the
studio to music listeners via PonoPlayer at the
highest digital resolution. According to the project
Kickstarter campaign page, “PonoMusic is not a new audio
file format or standard. PonoMusic is an end-to-end ecosystem for music lovers
to get access to and enjoy their favorite music exactly as the artist created
it, at the recording resolution they chose in the studio.“ The high-resolution music will
be available for purchase on the PonoMusic online store. The store will use the
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) audio format as its standard, but the player will
be able to play other most popular high-res music formats from other sources.
The difference
between the low-res format such as mp3 and FLAC format is that in order to
support a small file size, the mp3 compresses the original music file so much
that it loses a lot of the original musical information affecting the final
sound of the record, whereas the FLAC format has a very high resolution, which
allows all details of a song to stay maximally close to the original resolution
of the record. Mp3 format has a bit rate of 192kbps or 256kbps, while the ultra
high resolution FLAC format utilized for PonoMusic has a bit rate of 9216 kbps,
which is “about 30 times more data from which your player reconstructs the
“song”, according to PonoMusic.
The PonoPlayer
has an unusual triangular design, bringing memories of the “Toblerone” chocolate
bar. The reason why the player was designed that way is because in order to
support the desired functionality its creators needed to use larger audio and
battery components. The triangular shape was able to accommodate all these
components in the best way.
50 PonoPlayers
were produced for testing to date. Artists such as Pearl Jam, Tom Petty, Foo
Fighters, Dave Mathews Band, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sting, Beck, Norah Jones, Jack
White, James Taylor and many others were able to test the product, and all of
them were impressed by the music sound quality according to the promotional
video created for the campaign.
The PonoPlayer
can be pre-ordered by participating in the Kickstarter campaign or on PonoMusic.com.
The PonoMusic creators plan to deliver the first PonoPlayers to the Kickstarter
campaign supporters in October 2014. It will have a 1-year warranty and will
retail for $399 at the PonoMusic website.
