Neil Young must have a heart of gold! The Kickstarter campaign for his Pono music player has raised $4.9 million– and still has 19 days left.
Pono, according to Young, will revolutionize digital music because the sound will be eons better than iTunes or any of the other available compressed music systems.
The Pono Kickstarter campaign offers plenty of different incentives to early investors. Inadvertently it’s also become something of a popularity contest. Young has different batches of Limited Edition players– 500 in each collection assigned to different artists. But some of the artists have done better than others in fetching $300 or $400 for the players.
For example, all 500 of the personalized Crosby Stills & Nash players are sold out. So are the editions from Tom Petty, Pearl Jam, and Young himself. They’re all gone.
But there are plenty from other artists. Only 1 person has bought a Kenny Rogers Pono player. Just 30 have purchased players signed by Tegan & Sara. And there are still over 100 (at least) available personalized by Jackson Browne, Patti Smith, Metallica, Lenny Kravitz, James Taylor, Lyle Lovett, and others. They can still be picked up, as they say, for a song, until April 15th when the Kickstarter campaign closes.
