(Gibson) Neil Young's quest for a new online music service and digital player is gathering pace. Pono, his forthcoming service, will feature high-resolution master downloads of songs. Young's company has now made federal trademark applications for a pair of slogans – "Pono Promise" and "21st Century Digital."Young Tweeted earlier this month that Pono will roll out the service's cloud-based music-library component and portable digital-to-analog players by summer 2013.
During an interview with David Letterman in September, Young said he was "negotiating with Sony" and working on transferring albums including The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited for Pono. And Young is very serious about this: Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that he and Pono raised $500,000 investment in November.
In the past, Young has been critical of the MP3 / AAC formats and before that, even CDs. But Pono will be hi-res. Some reports suggest that, on average, a five-minute song on Pono would require 300MB of storage space. more on this story
