PONO Now 3rd highest Kickstarter Crowdfunding Campaign Of All Time

PONO Reaches #3 Top Campaign
Kickstarter Campaigns
(Click photo to enlarge)   Neil Young’s PONO Music Kickstarter campaign has become the 3rd highest Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign of all time.

PONO moved ahead of Veronica Mars with 5 days left in their funding project. PONO has now raised over $6,000,000 from over 17,000 backers. Congratulations PONO Team!

From the PONO Team:

Pono means righteous. It is a Hawaiian word, the one, the pureness. On behalf of Pono, we thank you for helping us give music a voice. You have helped to set the stage for a revolution in music listening. Finally, quality enters the listening space so that we can all hear and feel what the artists created, the way they heard and felt it.

This is done when the artist makes the best available, wanting to share it with you. It happens when the artist lets you hear and feel more than what is on your CD or MP3 of any song. CDs and MP3s are derived from the original masters, and now, with the PonoPlayer, you can finally feel the master in all its glory, in its native resolution, CD quality or higher, the way the artist made it, exactly. That’s the beauty of Pono.

It’s been a long time coming. It was not easy getting this far, but you made it happen by supporting Pono’s vision for better listening. We have been working with the labels, with the artists and producers, and we will continue to do that. We go to the source to find the best and bring it to you. Pono wants to preserve the history of music, in all of its beauty and expression, for all time. Forever.

There is a way to do this right, and we are going to do it. We will be sharing how we will do this with you over the next few months, while we build your first ever PonoPlayers. We are going to do some revolutionary things. We will make music available in a way that has never been done, a way that allows for constantly attaining the best listening experience.

Thank you to the artists, the recording companies, big and small, and most of all, thanks to you music lovers for making this happen with your amazing support.

Thanks for listening,

Neil Young & the PonoMusic team.

From Neil Young's Long Fight to Restore the Quality of Music by Seth Fiegerman:

The goal of the campaign wasn't to raise funds but rather to raise awareness by introducing the idea to a broader audience. Hamm says the company did quietly raise funding through traditional means to finance getting the player to prototype stage as well as setting up contracts with the major record labels. PonoMusic had been in talks with about 10 parties for a followup funding round, but he says "they probably wouldn't have been deals we would have liked at that point." Following the success of the Kickstarter campaign, the company is seeing more investor interest. The plan is to do an equity financing round in May or June.

The next step for PonoMusic will be to make good on delivering pre-ordered devices starting in October as well as to build up its content library of high-quality tracks provided by the major and independent labels. Beyond that, the company is evaluating whether and how to innovate with home stereo systems to car systems. The team argues that the Kickstarter campaign is validation that there is a market for high-quality music beyond just a handful of audiophiles.

"I'm gratified by the amount of pledges that we've had," Young says. "It's going to be challenging for us to keep up with the demand for Pono now that we have the ball rolling, but we will do it."

Neil Young
PONO Launch @ SXSW - March 11, 2014
Image: Dustin Finkelstein/Getty Images Entertainment
(Click photo to enlarge)

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