If you are a fan of Canadian rock legend Neil Young, you were probably surprised to learn that your Spotify and Apple Music apps suddenly stopped listing his music in the summer of 2015.
The good news is that Neil Young is officially back not only on Apple Music but also Deezer and Spotify, but it is important to understand the reasons behind why this influential musician was absent and whether his return will be permanent.
Neil Young’s long and prestigious career include more than 35 studio albums, countless collaborations, hundreds of legendary live appearances, and a lifetime of activism in support of Farm Aid and other causes that benefit North American agriculture and social justice for the rural poor as well as indigenous Americans.
The illustrious career of this celebrated musician took an unusual turn a few years ago when he announced his PonoMusic project, which has been a hotbed of controversy and the target of scathing criticism against a musician once believed incapable of acting in a self-serving manner or in bad faith.
The Pono Problem
Neil Young’s Pono project is an attempt to reach out to audiophiles like himself. The idea was to give music lovers a shot at what is known as “lossless” digital music, which means listening to audio as recording engineers meant to produce it.
In 2012, Young had criticized digital music services such as iTunes by Apple and the non-file sharing versions of Napster. As an audiophile, Young was never a big fan of the MP3 compression scheme; to this effect, he got together with a handful of fellow rock legends to create Pono, a service not unlike iTunes or today’s Apple Music but with high-fidelity audio files and a special portable music player.
Young’s PonoMusic has taken a lot of flack for various reasons. First of all, he collected six million dollars from a Kickstarter campaign; this did not sit well with people who asked why they should donate money to a bunch of millionaires. Once release, the Pono Player and the PonoMusic online service did not manage to win over many listeners beyond the most ardent audiophiles.
A few months after the debut of PonoMusic, Young pulled his catalog from the major streaming music services such as Apple Music and Spotify. He claimed that the poor quality of the audio prompted him to only offer digital tracks through his own Pono service. In April 2016, he allowed rival streaming service Tidal, also owned by rich musicians, to carry his catalog in a high-fidelity format that requires lots of bandwidth.
PonoMusic hit a snag a few months ago as its underlying digital platform was suddenly acquired. With Pono on hold, music industry analysts believe that Young was probably missing income from digital streams and thus he silently allowed his music to return to the major streaming services.
In other news, Young’s activism has not slowed down over the decades; he celebrated his 71st birthday with a live performance at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, where he joined Native Americans protesting a proposed oil pipeline running through their territory.
