Neil Young’s iPod Killer

0:00This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Neil Young is a rare artist. He's had big commercial success while also enjoying credibility as a musician's musician. He's also insanely prolific. Young has released dozens of albums. It's hard to pick a favorite Neil Young song, but I'm a simple man, and I think mine is probably Harvest Moon.

0:31Look, there are a lot of great choices. I think I'm more of a heart of gold guy myself. But Neil Young is not just some legend of classic rock. Best producer, Chris Berube. There is a whole other side of Neil Young's career, his bizarre experimental side. There's the Neil Young who made a divisive electronic music album.

1:03Or the Neil Young who designs model train sets. Neil Young even directed a very confusing sci-fi movie in the 80s starring Devo. It's called Human Highway. Good gas! Oh, it's bird gas! It's the best! You make it yourself? Nah, it comes from birds! Human Highway, man. It's a weird one. But perhaps the biggest swing came about four decades into his career, when Neil Young decided to make his own digital music player, which he called the Pono. You don't like the iTunes and the iPod and that kind of stuff. You've got this thing called Pono, which is your own music player. Well, because it's not that I don't like it, it's just that I can't play what I do.

1:50The Pono was meant to be a competitor to the iPod. The Pono was a portable digital music player, but unlike the iPod, it had a long, triangular, candy bar-esque shape. It looks like a Toblerone. It's not. It does. For your ears, it's even better than a Toblerone. Really? Yes, it sounds. Have you ever jammed a Toblerone in your ear, my friend? Neil Young unleashed the Pono in 2015 with a lot of media coverage and endorsements from famous musicians like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty. But the Toblerone-esque music player was confusing to a lot of potential consumers. Most people just didn't understand why it was necessary to replace their iPods with another device that retailed for about$400.

2:37Even Neil Young's fans did not totally get it. My initial reaction to it was really just sort of like, eh, let's see, I was 25 when it came out. I didn't have a lot of expendable income at that point. I wasn't in the market for something to replace my iPod. That's Nate Rogers, a writer and a music critic who wrote about Pono for the website Stereogum earlier this year. Nate also happens to be a Neil Young super fan. I have a Neil Young, a picture of Neil Young on the wall in here that I've been looking. I'm sitting directly across from 1979. It's Russ Never Sleeps tour. He's really rocking out with Crazy Horse.

3:19Looks happy. If you've never heard of Pono before, that's because it came and went in a few short years. And at the time, many critics dismissed Pono as a celebrity vanity project. But reading Nate Rogers' piece made me wonder if we were wrong about Pono. Because Nate's article is actually headlined, What if we were wrong about Pono? Like, maybe this awkward yellow triangular music player was actually a noble project. One we just weren't ready for. In the early 2010s, Neil Young was enjoying something of a career resurgence. He was playing shows across North America with his band Crazy Horse, and he was getting some of the best reviews of his career.

4:01But in interviews, Neil seemed upset, almost angry. He told journalists he was unhappy with the rise of digital downloads and that he didn't want to listen to songs on a computer. In fact, in one interview, Neil Young claimed he hadn't listened to music for over 15 years. I don't know how it's possible to not listen to music for 15 years, even if you're not a musician. So I don't really know what Neil was talking about there. I feel like he meant to say, like, I haven't listened to digital music in 15 years. But he did say that. So whatever. Maybe he did. Neil is an interesting person. Love him.

4:38You're probably thinking this all sounds like typical old guy. back in my day, stuff was better kind of crankiness. And to be fair, yes, okay, maybe it's a little bit of that. But Neil Young actually had a good reason for boycotting digital music. According to Young, digitized music just sounded wrong. The origin of the Pono is that Neil Young thinks that digital music destroyed music quality in general. When Neil got his start in the 60s, everybody was listening to music on vinyl. Today, of course, lots of folks love vinyl, but vinyl records were delicate and not super mobile. So in the 80s and 90s, vinyl was pushed out by new formats like cassette tapes and CDs.

5:20Cassettes were portable and handy. You could pop one of those bad boys into your Walkman or the console of your Dodge Neon and hit the road. But in the 90s, cassettes lost the format wars to CDs, which were slim and futuristic. They were just as portable as cassettes, but sounded much better. They didn't wear out or scratch as easily as vinyl. And they were free of the noise that plagued analog formats. But to people like Neil Young, there was something lost with the rise of CDs. A warmth. And MP3s? Well, that's where things started to get a whole lot worse. Because of something called compression.

6:02Basically, to fit a lot of songs onto a hard drive or an iPod, the files had to be pretty small, which means they had to be compressed or squeezed down in a way that reduces the quality of the music you're listening to. I guess the term is probably appropriately decimated. Maybe a tenth of that CD makes it onto an MP3 file. A way of measuring sound quality on a digital music file is in kilobits per second. A music file on a CD has about 1 ,400 kilobits of information per second. In a streaming MP3, that number goes down to about 96. It's shocking, honestly. It's very significant.

6:44It's hard to explain what gets lost when you do that much compression on an audio file. An MP3 of a song and a vinyl record might sound pretty similar to untrained ears. But to trained ears, there's a real difference. You know, a sense of ease to the sound. And that's going to be subjective and individual. But nevertheless, you know, if you listen to MP3s seriously, your attention wanders. John Atkinson is the former editor of Stereophile magazine. He says that with MP3s, listeners actually lose something pretty fundamental. Any transience in the music, you know, cymbal crashes, beats, drums. So what was a clean hit on a drum now becomes more of a burr on a drum.

7:33So if you listen to low-res MP3s, you start to aware that the sense of rhythm has been degraded. You're missing a lot of the harmonics when you strum a guitar or hit a piano key. You hear one note, but you also hear a whole series of harmonics and notes that trail off. That's Phil Baker. He worked as the product manager for Pono starting in 2012. You know, when you strum a guitar string, it's not just boom. It's ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. So all those other things are lost, or a good number of them are lost, because it's just truncates. It doesn't have the ability to play back that fine detail.

8:20There are a lot of subtleties. For many people, that's fine. They hear a music. They're used to listening to radio, whether it's AM or FM or Sirius XM, which, by the way, you know, transmits in a very, very low resolution. OK, thanks, Phil. When MP3s became the dominant way of listening to music, a lot of casual listeners just didn't mind the trade-off. But Neil Young believed he could do better. Because he had unbelievable resources, and because he's a very, very stubborn man, he was like, I'll just do it myself. And that's where Pono came from. In 2012, Neil Young announced his plans for the Pono player.

9:04To give listeners a truly great experience, he devised a plan for an online store that would only sell high-quality music files. Neil said Pono files wouldn't be comparable to what you would get on a record, but they would be a lot better than an MP3. While this whole thing is pretty technical, Neil made a handy video using a nautical metaphor to explain it. When you're on the bottom of the ocean, and you have a huge tank on your back and a big glass ball over your head, that's kind of, you know, you're walking around in the murk and there's big fish down there. That's kind of like listening to an MP3.

9:42And when you're listening to a CD, you've risen to, you know, maybe a couple of hundred feet below the surface, something like that. And you're still underwater. You're not quite in air. And according to Neil, to get to air, figuratively speaking, you need some Pono. And the feeling is different. Actually is a visceral relief. You feel good. With the store, listeners could buy higher quality files without going through a big tech middleman. Each album would cost about 20 bucks, which was higher than iTunes, but musicians would be paid more than the pennies they were getting from Apple. Neil Young presented the whole project as a matter of principle.

10:27Pono is the Hawaiian word for righteous, which is where Neil got that from and insisted on it, despite the fact that it sounds very close to porno. and in every headline, if you look at it too quickly, you might think that you're seeing a weird tech review of porn. To produce a device capable of playing these higher quality files, Neil Young had to recruit a crack team of experts, like Phil Baker, who had a distinguished career developing products at Apple and Polaroid. You know, the pressure was sort of on me. Everything I thought of, everything I would do, I would say, well, how does this affect Neil and his reputation?

11:10What I learned pretty quickly is that he didn't care. You know, don't worry about it. You know, are you going to try? Do your best? Phil says he met with Neil Young and a small team of engineers every few weeks to discuss the project. And while Neil had total confidence in Phil and his team, it was a huge task developing a music player from scratch. Apple is a machine, and we were like a, you know, a tiny little animal in comparison to their jet engine. Phil says by the time he got there, the Pono team had already settled on the triangular shape for the device. While you could fit the Pono player into your hand, it was a little too big for some pockets.

11:50But there was a very good reason for the bulkier form. Here's Nate Rogers. It was shaped like a Toblerone because it needed more space to fit the hardware and the battery in particular, because in the mid-2010s, The battery had to be larger than your average iPod battery to power hardware that was more powerful than your iPod hardware. So you just couldn't fit all of that in that space and you needed a rechargeable battery that was substantial. And so I think like the combination of those two things is where the weird shape came from. By the way, if you tell Phil Baker that it's Toblerone shaped, he will correct you.

12:28People compared it to a Toblerone bar, but in reality, it was an equilateral trunk. triangle. Shape wasn't the only thing that set Pono apart from its mainstream competitor. You also couldn't go on the internet or do other things on your Pono. Another factor was the size of the screen, which was smaller than the iPod. That choice came down to cost. You know, LCDs were really tough to get that time, so we couldn't make a big flat device. You could get a big screen, but they were custom, very, very expensive. And our goal was to do something that was under$300. So the display was a display that came off the back of a compact camera.

13:12After nine months of tinkering in R &D, Phil and his team finished a prototype, a yellow Toblerone, an equilateral triangle of music. And did it look funny? Yes, it did. But it also had enough space to hold a bunch of high-quality music files. And it was small enough to carry around. And it wasn't catastrophically expensive. Honestly, a pretty big win, all things considered. But there was a final hurdle to getting the Pono on the market. They needed cash. Because it turns out, making an iPod killer takes a lot of money. Even with a rich celebrity footing the bill. If you look at the cost to build, let's say, 5 ,000 units, if it cost you, even if they were$100 a piece, You know,$100 times$5 ,000 is half a million dollars.

14:01So just start building units. And they started a Kickstarter campaign to try to generate enough money to set this thing off, which is a very, very difficult thing to set off any sort of digital device. To hype up the Kickstarter, Neil Young filmed a series of videos where he showed off the prototype to his celebrity friends who raved about how much better the Pono sounded compared to the iPod. He had like a car that he would bring like backstage at shows or something like that or drive up to Tom Petty's house. You know, all these random places in this video of Neil just like flexing on everybody by being like, I can show up to Elton John's house and just get him to listen to this because I'm Neil Young.

14:44And honestly, you know, respect. It blew me away. It was like being in a recording studio. It was like we were listening to Bob Dylan. You could hear him playing harmonica right next to you. You could hear the drums and the backing vocals on Respect by Aretha. I haven't heard a sound like that since vinyl. While the video was pretty crude, Young's star power got a lot of people's attention. And the Kickstarter was a hit. It was like the third most successful Kickstarter campaign ever at the time that they did it. So they were kind of off and running. Well, when we started the Kickstarter campaign, we basically sold about 15 ,000 units to Kickstarter members.

15:21I don't think we ever expected that number. While the Kickstarter hit its goal really fast, it still took about two and a half years to get the Pono to market, because the development team wanted to make sure the Pono player would meet the high-quality standards of true music fans. We had a handful of products that had to be repaired. And I mean a handful, you know, maybe a dozen or so out of the 15 ,000 products that we shipped. So we were very, very lucky. After years of hype, in early 2015, the Pono was finally made available to the public. The device itself retailed for$399, about$100 more than the iPod.

16:06Thanks to the Kickstarter's success, the Pono seemed to be on everybody's radar. But all of the hype might have put a target on its back, because a lot of music journalists reviewing the Pono did not like it. Critics slammed Pono's awkward shape and the elevated price. And some writers seemed upset the Pono existed at all. Slate Magazine called the whole thing a vanity project. Many reviews called out Pono for carrying fewer songs than other music players. Essentially, to use the Pono, a lot of people would have to pick and choose which albums you wanted on there at any given time. Like maybe you'd be able to fit 10 or 20.

16:45and you would choose which ones on any given day, you know, you'd want to go take with you. There was a sense the knives were out for Pono, which in hindsight, isn't a big surprise. I mean, come on, Neil Young named the product after the Hawaiian word for righteous. And as Stereo Files John Atkinson points out, there's a particular disdain reserved for music nerds, especially those who try to make you buy expensive high-tech gear. The ex-stereo-file writer Michael Fremer wrote about this some years ago. But he said, you know, you read the Sunday Times and they're advertising, you know,$400, you know, crockery sets,$4 ,000 lamps,$40 ,000 watches, and they're all regarded as legitimate.

17:32But when you have a$400 Pono plan, oh my goodness, that's snake oil, it's ripping people off. High Fidelity has always been like that. But still, it was surprising to read the many critics who targeted Pono for its sound quality. Some critics argued the music experience on the Pono player was somehow worse than on an iPhone. Even though Pono files were objectively larger and higher fidelity, some reviews said that you couldn't tell the difference between the Pono and the iPod, especially when they played it for other people. One critic named David Pogue went so far as to set up A-B testing. with average people comparing Pono and Pono grade files and iPod and iPod grade files.

18:18And he also used over-ear headphones and he used earbuds. And his group of people that he chose pretty clearly chose the iPod over the Pono, no matter which combination of things he did. According to David Pogue, testers could not spot the difference. whether they were listening on tinny earbuds or over plush, expensive headphones. It might sound surprising that a higher quality audiophile actually sounds worse to most listeners, but most people just picked what they were most familiar with. It's kind of like how most people, people like me, can't really tell the difference between a$20 bottle of wine and an$80 bottle of wine.

19:00In the end, it all just tastes like wine. It's really hard to use a part of your brain that's not activated when you listen to music and look for that stuff because it's so in the deep weeds of what the music is. The bad reviews didn't help, but they weren't fatal. In the end, Pono was a victim of timing. Pono kind of hit the market at the absolute worst time. When it was conceived in 2012, Apple sold 35 million iPods. But by 2014, sales were way down, and Apple actually discontinued the iPod Classic. The iPod was made obsolete by the iPhone, which could play music but also make phone calls and surf the internet and do all the other stupid things we do on our phones.

19:48The idea of a single-use MP3 player was totally outdated. Not only that, downloading MP3s became totally outdated too because of the rise of streaming music. Streaming was the new thing, and it was the future. And there was no world in which you could convince people to buy a really bulky, pretty expensive MP3 player. In 2015, services like Spotify exploded in popularity. And rivals like Apple Music offered an entire world of sound for$10 a month. That's about half of what it cost to get a popular new record in the Pono store. Just to really add insult to injury, one of the big tech giants made it really hard to get new music for the Pono.

20:35In 2016, Apple bought the company that ran the Pono store and put them out of business. You know, at the time we looked at transferring all the work we did. There weren't very few companies developing music stores, but we talked to others. And it was just too expensive and too complex. We didn't have the resources to really start over again and create another store. The Pono team tried hanging on for a little while. But in 2017, Young announced they were winding down the project. While numbers were never made public, it's believed Neil Young lost a lot of money on the Pono. And while some people might be embarrassed by all this, Phil Baker says Neil took it in stride.

21:18We weren't having the great success. I figured, well, Neil is going to be upset. He probably doesn't want to talk to me anymore. What I found was so surprising. He just was, you know, very matter-of-fact about it. Like, you know, this record didn't end up number one, maybe my next record will, or something like that. He was very normal, I guess I would say. It's been about a decade now since Pono's Rise and Fall. And as a casual Neil Young fan, I'd always just thought of it as some footnote in his incredible career. But when I read Nate Rogers' article, I took a step back and considered maybe there's more to the Pono than its goofy reputation.

22:03Because the Pono, it kind of looks prophetic when you consider just how much things have changed about our relationship to music. In the past 10 years, we have devalued music in lots of ways. In the 90s, artists could make a pretty good living off CD sales. Then, with iTunes, they made a less good living selling MP3s. Today, on Spotify, musicians generally receive one-third of a cent every time their song is played. The Pono was trying to stand for something. For high quality and respect for artists. But instead, as music fans, we've chosen a different path. One of convenience and low prices. Sure, the Pono store selling a high-quality album for$20 seems really expensive by today's standards.

22:49But now lots of musicians can't make ends meet. Maybe we need to spend$20 once in a while. And the devaluation of music isn't just financial. There's also the matter of appreciation. So much of what shaped my music listening experience was buying records that I decided I was going to get my money's worth. And being like, I value this because I bought it. And I'm going to spend time with it and get to know it. And Pono's whole approach was music fidelity, but it's also just, it's a broader element of like active participation. When people just have thousands and thousands of songs at their fingertip, it diminishes your relationship to the music.

23:37If you want to experience Neil Young's dream for the Pono, maybe you don't need that yellow triangular music player. It might be enough to spend a little more time with art. Just linger in front of a painting at a museum. Or read a book at a coffee shop with your phone in your pocket. Or just listen to a record while doing nothing else. And let the music in.

24:13There is a way to hear higher quality music in the streaming age. And we will tell you about it. After this.

24:27So we are back with Chris Berube. Hey, Chris. Hey, Roman. So we've been talking about the listening experience of the Pono. And I was wondering, did you get a chance to actually listen to one? Roman, I tried. I tried so hard. I asked lots of people how to get a hold of one. I ordered one on eBay and the seller sent me a message saying, this item doesn't exist. Sorry about this. I've never seen that before. Like I've never tried to buy an item on eBay and they're like, we actually don't. This isn't a real thing. I'm not sure what happened with that. And actually most of the ones on eBay, there are a few for sale on eBay.

25:01Most of them are just there for spare parts. So you could buy it to fix problems with your existing Pono, but there are not a lot of new Ponos that you could buy through that. Well, that is too bad. And actually kind of weird that there hasn't been one that's like filtered into the secondary market at all. I know. It's just they're impossible to find. And actually, Nate Rogers, who wrote the piece for Stereogum that was the basis for all of this, he tried to get one for his story. No luck on that. But I do have some good news, which is that there is a substitute that tries to recreate the experience of hearing music on the Pono.

25:34OK, how does that work? So there is a website called the Neil Young Archives. And actually, Phil Baker works on this project. So after Pono, Phil kept collaborating with Neil Young. and he helped to put together this website. It's kind of actually laid out like an archive. Like, it's a really fun bit of design, the website. Like, you go on there, it looks like you're entering a filing cabinet. And then you go through, and there's just all of this arcana for Neil Young. The Neil Young Archives is really a depository of everything you would find in a real archive. Handwritten notes, photographs of objects, lyrics, timelines.

26:12minds, you know, it's just a wealth of information. So you get basically all of these DVD extras of Neil Young's career and life. And on top of all that, it has all of Neil's music streaming in high resolution. So they're trying to do something that is similar to what you would hear on the Pono. And Phil actually sent me a subscription to check it out. So I got to listen to that for a while. So did you notice a difference between what you could sort of get in the Neil Young archive versus what you could hear on Spotify or something like that? I got to be honest from it i came into this being so skeptical like this whole story even after doing this whole story i was still kind of like how big of a difference could it be and i put it on and just immediately i was like oh that sounds better that actually sounds quite a bit better uh and then i list a couple of neil young songs on spotify switched over listened to the same ones on the archives and i could really hear like these little differences like you could hear the harmonica trailing off like kind of these little things that we talk about in the story now i should say I was primed to listen for that kind of thing after working on the story for so long.

27:13So take it with a grain of salt. I might have been set up to, you know, believe this. But no, I really did notice a difference. That's really interesting. But this is just for Neil Young's music, right? Like there isn't other music that you can try out. That's right. So it's not like a total recreation of the Pono experience because all you can get is Neil Young's archive on there. But I think a lot of people don't know this. actually, you actually can access higher resolution music on a lot of streaming services. Did you know about this, Roman? I remember that being a selling point of Tidal. I don't know if Tidal still exists, but that's the only one I've really heard of.