Neil Young & Phil Baker - To Feel the Music

Musicians such as myself attempt to record music at the highest sound quality available. We take excruciating care to preserve every detail from each instrument, each voice, and the surrounding environment. We do this knowing that the more you hear, the more you feel the music in your soul.

However, today’s recording and tech industries just don’t care about the sound of music. They’re content to deliver music at a much lower quality, essentially stripping and dumbing down the art of recorded music, so that listeners are able to hear only a small part of the original audio recordings. These original recordings can have depth, breadth, and clarity that captures all of the subtleties, echoes, reverberations, and characteristics of the performance environment. The compressed versions, on the other hand, lack all of those details, sounding muddy, one-dimensional, and flat. The decision to compress music not only affects what we hear now—it will affect what we’ll be able to hear in the future, too.

To Feel the Music is an account of my efforts to challenge the music industry and the technology community on behalf of all artists and music fans to restore audio quality to what it once was and to save the soul of the music, thereby saving the future of music. This effort to rescue music is the most important professional undertaking of my entire career.

This book chronicles how I and a small team invented and brought to market solutions that serve as an example of what could be done. With Pono, my early effort at creating a high-resolution music player and download service, we showed the industry that it was possible to deliver the highest-quality audio to thousands of music lovers at an affordable cost. What we did was not anything extraordinary. Others in the industry could have done it, though few seemed to care. But that was not the end of our efforts; it was just the beginning.

As music streaming increased, the industry moved to even poorer-quality audio. The sound of music went from bad to worse. Yet, I was convinced there must be a solution. If streaming was the future, couldn’t it be better? To that end, I worked with an even smaller team, including a tiny company in Singapore called OraStream, and we developed new streaming technology that is far superior to anything else available. I’ve introduced this high-resolution streaming on my Neil Young Archives (NYA). Called Xstream by NYA, it was my follow-up to Pono, to marry the convenience of streaming with the best quality that users’ devices can handle. High-res streaming is my second initiative to show the industry what can be done.

I’ve put my name and reputation on the cause of better audio. I’ve pointed out the failures of the tech giants to deliver it and will continue to do so because it’s something I believe in very deeply. I’m going to continue this quest on behalf of musicians and music lovers so that all of you can hear what you deserve—just what was intended by the artists who created it.