Less than a year after shutting down his streaming service PONO, Neil Young is getting ready to launch another, XStream.
On the PONO community page, Young wrote: “Finding a way to deliver the quality music without the expense and to bring it to a larger audience has been our goal.
“That effort has led to a technology developed by Orastream, a small company in Singapore that we’ve been working with.
“Together we created Xstream, the next generation of streaming, an adaptive streaming service that changes with available bandwidth. It is absolutely amazing because it is capable of complete high resolution playback.”
Young promised Xstream will offer “every recording I have ever released.”
The Canadian rocker launched PONO in 2014 with $6.2 million USD in Kickstarter funds and promised to “save the sound of music.” But the service was shut down last July.
Young said the cost of operating PONO was simply too high.
“When it comes to high-res, the record industry is still broken,” he wrote. “I believe all music should cost the same, regardless of the technology used.
“All songs should cost the same, regardless of digital resolution. Let the people decide what they want to listen to without charging them more for true quality. That way quality is not an elitist thing. If high-resolution costs more, listeners will just choose the cheaper option and never hear the quality.”
In a 2015 interview, Young said streaming “sucks” and called it the “worst audio in history.”
No details have been released about pricing and a launch date for Xstream.
“We will be announcing it very soon,” Young wrote.