By the time musician Neil Young appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman in September 2012, he\u2019d had enough [1]. Beginning with the widespread adoption of CDs in the early 1980s, digitalization had become a hallmark of the music industry. Now, more than a decade after Apple launched the iPod and one year after Spotify\u2019s streaming service landed on US shores, Young believed the digital revolution gone too far. For him, the reductions in sound quality necessary to conveniently store and stream digital music had deprived it of its emotional impact. \u201cI don\u2019t feel right allowing this to be sold to my fans,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt\u2019s bad for my music” [2]. He showed Letterman his solution: a triangular yellow widget called \u201cPono.\u201d<\/p>\n
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A year earlier, Neil Young had teamed up with tech sector CEO John Hamm to build what would become PonoMusic. Their mission was to leverage advances in digital technology to rescue the lost \u201csoul\u201d of music from hollow-sounding formats that had come to dominate the industry. For customers, they promised an uncompromising approach: the world\u2019s highest quality listening experience, delivering their favorite music exactly as the artist intended it [3]. The value proposition was an immersive sonic experience that couldn\u2019t be replicated by existing digital platforms. After demo-ing the product to hundreds of well-known musicians, Young was confident that consumers would also want to \u201cfeel<\/em> more from the music with Pono.\u201d Eighteen months after appearing Letterman, he launched a much-hyped Kickstarter campaign with a goal of raising $800,000.00. It closed 35 days later having raised over $6,200,000.00, the third-largest project in Kickstarter history [4]. After raising an additional $6,000,000.00 in crowd-sourced equity in mid-2014, Young\u2019s vision finally became a reality in early 2015 [5].<\/p>\n <\/p>\n