Writing in his book
Waging Heavy Peace, Young expressed concern about digital audio quality, criticizing in particular the quality offered by
Apple's iTunes Store. "My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I've been practicing for the past 50 years," he said.
Founding PonoMusic was founded in 2012 by Young, along with Silicon Valley entrepreneur John Hamm as the company's CEO. The name was derived from
pono (), a
Hawaiian word for "righteousness." Pono reportedly had backing from, and had signed a full agreement, with
Warner. In September 2012, Young appeared on the
Late Show with David Letterman with a prototype of the player, and confirmed backing from Warner, as well as major record labels
Sony, and
Universal. Young claimed that Pono would provide "the finest quality, highest-resolution digital music from major labels as well as prominent independent labels" using the
FLAC audio file format. On March 12, 2014, the company with the help of
Alex Daly and her crowdfunding consultancy Vann Alexandra, launched a successful
crowdfunding campaign on
Kickstarter that surpassed its target in one day. PonoMusic raised $6.2 million via pre-orders for the player by the end of the campaign. In June 2014, Young assumed the title of CEO of Pono Music. In August 2014, PonoMusic turned to
Crowdfunder to raise more equity. They closed with a total financing of $4 million. While many more international investors were interested, they had to be turned away due to regulatory restrictions. The Pono player and music store was officially launched in January 2015. By June 2015, however,
Variety Magazine reported that PonoMusic struggled with funding issues, which had slowed the company's expansion. Prior to June 2015, Young had sought financial backing from
Donald Trump.
Pono products PonoMusic's products are based on the
FLAC audio format, which the company re-branded as
Pono audio format. The player device, called the
PonoPlayer, was initially priced at $399 and came with a maximum of 128GB of memory (64GB built-in plus 64GB on MicroSD card). The press release noted that the PonoPlayer, developed in collaboration with Ayre Acoustics, could store "100 to 500 high-resolution digital-music albums". PonoMusic was the device's accompanying desktop-based media management system, which allowed customers to download and sync music to the player. They further stated that during this shutdown period, PonoMusic would be transitioning to a new platform provided by
7digital. The website, however, has been in a non-operating "under construction" state since then. In April 2017, Young announced the PonoMusic store was being discontinued, but with future plans to transition the service from a download model to a high-resolution streaming service to be known as "Xstream". As of October 2019, however, the service had yet to launch, and there have been no further announcements regarding its future. == Ecosystem ==