Neil Young wants fans to steal MP3s of his new album

by Richard Howard

June 21, 2016

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'We want everybody to have it. I don’t give a shit... Go make it yourself and take it home!'

Neil Young hates MP3s. Like, with a passion. Your sound engineer friend might complain about the loss of quality inherent to the compressed file format and comparable ones like AAC, but he’ll still keep an iPod around for when he goes jogging. Young, meanwhile, partnered with a tech company in order to create an entirely new music player, online store, and media management system designed to provide what he believes is the proper listening experience. As he’s explained in the past:

“My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years. We live in the digital age, and unfortunately it’s degrading our music, not improving.”

Young’s $400 PonoPlayer has had a tough go so far, seeing less-than-stellar sales figures and complications with establishing the PonoMusic service outside of the United States. That doesn’t change the fact that the singer still believes MP3s are absolute poo, and he’s putting his (potentially earned) money where his mouth is, encouraging fans to make their own MP3s of his music since he refuses to sell it in the format.

Speaking on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, Young let fans know that if they were fine with listening to his new album Earth using the inferior format, they were free to go to town illegally ripping the tunes.

“We want everybody to have it. I don’t give a shit. Yeah, it’s like, I can’t sell that crap. Go make it yourself and take it home!”

Because Young is Young, he went even further and drew a road map to an additional way fans could procure MP3s of Earth:

“If you wanna get it, I think they play the whole album on Tidal in a couple of weeks. Go onto Tidal and just record it off of Tidal! It’s gonna be 44.1 [kHz]. So that way everybody can get it, ’cause I’m not selling them. I’m not selling the MP3.”

God love the guy. If you do want to show your support for the Canadian legend and plunk down some cash for the album, Earth is going to be available on vinyl, CD, and as PonoMusic files.

[h/t Exclaim!]

Tags: Music, News, Earth, marc maron, mp3, neil young, pono, tidal, wtf

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