Reuters – Tue, Jan 31, 2012

New York, Jan 31 (TheWrap.com) - Neil Young said Tuesday that he is picking up where Steve Jobs left off, working on a device that can offer digital music without sacrificing quality as iTunes, Amazon and others have done.
"Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, but when he went home he listened to vinyl," Young told Peter Kafka and Walt Mossberg at AllThingsD's Dive Into Media Conference. "I have to believe if he lived long enough he would have tried to do what I'm trying to do."
The legendary rocker is working on a separate device that downloads each song at the highest possible resolution, but that also takes 30 minutes to complete a single download.
Young said he is trying to make legal music as convenient as possible, but some worried that the long download times would be inconvenient.
Young disagreed.
"While you're sleeping, your device is working for you," he said.
Young did not invoke Jobs' name at random. He said that he had been talking with Jobs about the project, but that since the Apple co-founder died in October there is "not much going on now."
In order for it to hit the market the "rich people out here" --meaning the conference audience-- need to help.
Yet just because Young resents digital music and technology companies for reducing the quality of most audio content, that doesn't mean he takes a backwards approach to illegal music or the Internet.
"I look at Internet as the new radio and radio as gone," Young said. "Piracy is the new radio; it's how music gets around."
What does that mean for record companies?
Young hopes they hang around.
"I like Warner Bros. I like my record company," he told Kafka and Mossberg, the latter of whom asked what record companies can really do for someone of his stature.
"It's not what's for me but for other musicians," Young said. "What I like about record companies is they nurture an artist, they keep encouraging artists to grow. That doesn't exist on iTunes. That doesn't exist on Amazon."
But Young also acknowledged that the record companies make bad business decisions because they are music people who live "in another world from Silicon Valley."
Acknowledging those that proclaim record companies are obsolete, all Young could say was "maybe they are."

There was also a small article in the WSJ, Ethan Smith:
The famously contrarian Mr. Young said onstage at the D: Dive Into Media conference in Data Point, Calif., that consumers get "5% of what we originally make in the studio," referring to the way audio signals are compressed when they are sold by online stores such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes and we they are ripped from a compact disc onto consumers' hard drives." The poor sound quality undermines the artistic intent of musicians such as him, Mr. Young said.
"We can't control the back-end of the donkey," he said, using the colorful metaphor to argue that musicians and record companies can't control how consumers listen to music...
The article goes on to site similar info in the post above.
mmm - never thought of myself as a mule

Video of NY at Dive into Media conference : [www.marketwatch.com]

very interesting read, i hope he suceeds

wav, MP3, FLAC, lossless, 'less lossless'..
I imagine my grand-grand children arguing about quality while downloading Hampton 81 and Brussels in 2080...

"I imagine my grand-grand children arguing about quality while downloading Hampton 81 and Brussels in 2080..."

No they'll just laugh about you for getting these musical gems in mp3 "format"