How Neil Young's reluctance to embrace streaming doomed his company PonoMusic, even as the company helped the industry to adapt high-resolution music
Toward the end of music legend Neil Young's recent memoir, he makes an admission: “I was wrong.” — The book, To Feel the Music …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Quartz piece closes a decade-long arc that TEXXR has tracked from the start: the $400 PonoPlayer launched in January 2015 to reviews finding no discernible sound improvement over ordinary files, and within months Young had pulled his entire catalog from streaming services on quality grounds. By mid-2016 the Pono store itself was offline for weeks while it swapped audio backend providers from Omnifone to 7digital — a sign the standalone operation was already struggling with basic infrastructure.
First-order effects
- Young now concedes in his memoir 'To Feel the Music' that resisting streaming was a mistake — an admission that retroactively reframes his 2015 withdrawal as a strategic error rather than a principled stand.
Second-order effects
- PonoMusic's collapse did not take high-resolution audio down with it: the company's push helped the broader industry adapt hi-res formats inside mainstream streaming services, meaning the market Young tried to serve exclusively was absorbed by the very platforms he boycotted.
Third-order effects
- Young's own later behavior proves the pattern holds against individual artists: after giving Spotify an ultimatum between his catalog and Joe Rogan's podcast in January 2022, he returned his music to the service in March 2024, conceding that no rival platform offered comparable reach — artist leverage over streamers is real but episodic, and access ultimately wins.
The trend: Artists who withhold catalogs from dominant streaming platforms lose the distribution war regardless of the principle, because platform reach has become the non-negotiable asset.