In April, Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young announced that he was shifting gears on his high-fidelity audio project, PONO. The online component of the PONO enterprise was left without a music distributor when the distributor shuttered their doors. What began as a music player and online music store hsd now become a high-quality streaming service called Xstream. This week, Young not only released his thirty-ninth studio album, The Visitor, he also launched the Neil Young Archive, a site that contains almost his entire back catalog using the service, which visitors can listen to in a high quality format.
Young has decried the relatively low quality that most music is available in for digital audiences. In 2012, he told Walt Mossberg and Peter Kafka at D: Dive Into Media that he was concerned about the quality of MP3, and hoped that better devices would come to market that would bring allow audiences to listen to music the way it was meant to be heard. In 2014, he put his money where his mouth was and kickstarted a music player called Pono, and later launched an accompanying music store. He later pulled his entire catalog from the various streaming services out there, saying that he was frustrated by the low quality: “I don't need my music to be devalued by the worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution."
You can now listen to nearly all of his back catalog, for free, at
least through June 30th, after which users can subscribe “at a very
modest cost,” according to my welcome e-mail. The archive, Young
says, was developed “to provide fans and music historians with
unprecedented access to all of my music and to my entire archives in
one convenient location,” and is available via the high-quality
streaming streaming service he announced earlier this year.
In April, he said that Xstream would be an “adaptive streaming
service that changes with available bandwidth,” and the site will
automatically adjust the streaming rate based on a user’s
connection, according to the audio set up section on the site. The
quality will go from an MP3 quality all the way up to 192kHz/24-bit
high resolution, while the music files themselves are of master
quality. The site will display the quality while you listen, and
users can toggle between 320kbps or master resolution if they wish.
Listeners can browse through the site as a filing cabinet or as a timeline, starting with his 1963 song Aurora from his first act, The Squires, and going all the way up to his latest release, The Visitor. Each section is accompanied by additional material: scans of the sheet music, press clippings, and pictures. Not everything can be streamed: some of his work with Buffalo Springfield, such as “For What It’s Worth”, and several unreleased albums aren’t available to stream. The site’s FAQ also says that more material will be regularly added.
While the site isn’t exactly the most intuitive — Young recorded a 10-minute tutorial video to explain how to use the site — and it isn’t available on your mobile phone, it’s a fascinating, deep dive into a vast body of work, one that goes far beyond your typical artist homepage. It showcases not only more than a half-century of music, but lets you listen the way that it was intended to be heard in the first place.
After years and various incarnations the Neil Young Archives has been unleashed for free. This archive is a sprawling website and streaming platform featuring everything Young has recorded as a soloist and bandleader, as well as with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and listings regarding Young-related films and books. Unreleased Young albums and recordings such as Chrome Dreams, Homegrown, and Freedom Live are listed but not yet available to stream, as Pitchfork notes.
The retro-modern creative features an old stereo and a filing cabinet. The file cabinet is threre to help navigate fans through the archives.
Parts of the site are very confusing (the practical use of the filing cabinet section, mostly), but that seems to be in the interest of promoting spontaneous discovery. If you’re confused, there’s a video tutorial by Young available on the home page, as well as a written explanation of the purpose and methodology of the Archives. A good way to start: go to the “Timeline” section and scroll through the 50-year-plus run of Young’s career, and click around the albums linked there. Fans can also look forward to updates from Young in the “NYA News” section of the site. Again, this is all free if you give an email address..
