Pono Pitch

Kickstarter may seem like an unlikely beginning for one of the music industry’s highly anticipated debuts, but Neil Young’s PonoPlayer digital music player was one of Kickstarter’s most successful campaigns: it raised over $6-million, well past its original goal of $800,000. Young’s time in the music industry has allowed him to see many eras of audio formatting—the musician’s first forays into the industry were released on vinyl—and his experience with different types of music files influenced his decision to concentrate on quality rather than quantity. To compensate for the size of its high-quality audio files, the player, which was released in February, features a microSD slot on its triangular body, and its memory supports six different audio formats in varying qualities.