Neil Young's oddly shaped MP3 player has apparently found a small niche, regardless of whether listeners can actually hear the difference between its 24-bit, 192kHz songs and music streamed or downloaded from the likes of Apple or Spotify. In a Facebook post last week, Young indicated that "tens of thousands of players and hundreds of thousands of tracks" had been sold and that the Pono Players manufactured so far had a three percent failure rate.
That said, the company is still running into trouble stemming from its lack of resources, suggesting that it has spent the bulk of its $6.2 million Kickstarter haul from last year. Young wants Pono to expand into Canada, Great Britain, and Germany, among other countries, but it doesn't currently have the funding. The company also continues its hunt for a "proven business leader" to serve as CEO, a role Young stepped into when former CEO John Hamm (not to be confused with actor Jon Hamm) left in July of 2014.
The rest of Young's lengthy post emphasizes that this is a "delicate time" for Pono, but that he wants to continue providing high-quality players, music, speakers, headphones, and other "breakthrough products built to bring music to its rightful place in the twenty-first century."
"This is truly worth it," Young writes. "This mission is worth it to all of the people who have stuck with Pono from the beginning as well as people who may not even be aware of it yet. People like us believe so much in our goal of saving music for the masses forever. We know our mission is the most important thing. That is Pono."
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