How Neil Young raised $2 million in two days
As of Today Neil Young has been pledged almost $3 million for Pono! (with 8,980 backers!)
Forbes talks to Neil Young about he raised $2 million in two days on Kickstarter for his Pono project.
The Pono players will cost $399 and a projected $15-$25 per album price tag when the entire system goes live in October.
Staff writer Zack O’Malley Greenburg writes about the fact that, “at this very moment, he’s raising money for Pono–his long-awaited music player and service for high-quality audio files–at a rate of about $700 per minute via Kickstarter. Along with previous support from some outside investors, that will be more than enough to bring Pono to market this fall.”
“Thank goodness that we have the investors that we have, because we were able to get as far as we could” before launching the Kickstarter campaign, says Young. “Far enough to be able to show the product. … But we couldn’t get [corporate] investors to get interested in saving an art form.”
For Young, though, Pono is about much more than a Kickstarter campaign. He wants to create an entire iTunes-like ecosystem for high-quality digital files, complete with an answer to the iPod (the PonoPlayer) and the iTunes Store (the PonoMusic.com Store).
Pono’s business model is similar, too: revenues will be divided in a manner similar to the 70/30 split between content creators and Apple. Says Pono chief executive John Hamm: ”That’s the same deal we have. That’s the same deal everyone has.”
Read more at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2014/03/13/how-neil-youngs-pono-music-raised-2-million-in-two-days/