Neil Young Hates MP3s So Much, He Wants Fans to Steal Them

Neil Young is the latest musician to drop by Marc Maron’s garage for a conversation on his “WTF” podcast. He showed up to talk about his new album EARTH, which he said “is like a movie.” He also told Maron that he’s not selling MP3s of the album, just vinyl, CD, and PONO files. He added that he hates MP3s so much that he doesn’t care how fans get the files: “We want everybody to have it. I don’t give a shit. Yeah, it’s like, I can’t sell that crap. Go make it yourself and take it home!” In fact, he encouraged fans to just rip the files:

If you wanna get it, I think they play the whole album on Tidal in a couple of weeks. Go onto Tidal and just record it off of Tidal! It’s gonna be 44.1 [kHz]. So that way everybody can get it, ’cause I’m not selling them. I’m not selling the MP3. When I start talking like that, my manager shows up.

Elsewhere in the conversation, they discussed Young’s childhood, learning guitar, and his early days with Buffalo Springfield, as well as his children, driving a hearse with Ontario license plates, love songs, and of course, the PONO music player. Maron asked Young about “the idea of the PONO,” which he believed was “to sort of engage the depth of that sound” of music. Young told him:

The idea of PONO is to give you exactly what was created without putting anybody’s intellectual property device, like MP3 or the new MP3–whatever it is, the hi-res files. Yeah, encoding and compression, we don’t have any of that, and we just have a excellent playback system in the player. You can listen to it on other players, but our player was voted best in the world by Stereophile, so we got a great-sounding player. It’s made by a genius guy who really hears, and, you know, we found him and he made the player for us, and he’s so great.

So it all sounds really good if you really like good pure files of the music you love, whether it’s old or new. That’s what we sell at ponomusic.com.

Later, Young says that, although he’s made protest music lately, he is not a bitter person: “I’m a happy guy. I’m not an unhappy person. That’s for sure.” What does bother him is how little people care about issues like climate change and insect extinction, he said.

He and Maron also discussed a number of Young’s records. Young said he recorded 2003’s Greendale, for instance, while driving around his property in his car. 2005’s Prairie Wind, he said, was written after learning that he had a brain aneurysm.

Listen to the whole conversation here. Read our 5-10-15-20 interview with Marc Maron. Watch his “Frames” episode on Pitchfork.tv:

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