PonoPlayer Racks Up Over $2.5 Million In Pledges On Kickstarter

So the other day we reported that musician Neil Young’s media player, the PonoPlayer, had made its way onto Kickstarter. The concept of the PonoPlayer and a special music format was announced a while back but we guess they had finally gotten around to putting it onto Kickstarter for funding.

Now based on the Kickstarter, they were only looking for around $800,000 to fund the creation of the device, but it turns out that the project was quite a big hit, surprisingly, and has since managed to raise more than $2.5 million at this time of reporting.

For those unfamiliar, the PonoPlayer is a media player that would play high quality audio files, instead of your typical MP3 files which aren’t necessarily the best quality. Sure they’re more than sufficient to get by but for the audiophile and for those who really care about quality, MP3 is definitely not the way to go.

Instead audiophiles tend to turn to audio formats like FLAC, Ogg, and in the case of the PonoPlayer, Pono. The media player will be accompanied by a music store of their own called PonoMusic where listeners will be able to purchase high quality songs for use with their media player.

Of course it will be tough to try and compete with the likes of the iPod and iTunes, but if $2.5 million is anything to go by, it looks like there are definitely many out there who are interested and willing to give it a go. If you’d like to learn more or perhaps to pledge your donation, hit up its Kickstarter page for the details.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Audio
Tags: Kickstarter, ponoplayer, Social Hit