Neil Young Claims He Was Working on iPod Follow Up With Steve Jobs

Neil Young has claimed that he was working in tandem with late Apple guru Steve Jobs on a high resolution audio device that would follow up the iPod when Jobs passed away last year. The device would be self-contained and could download content while you stack Zs! Forward-thinking, right?

According to The Guardian, while at the D: Drive Into Media technology conference, Young revealed the details of the device he and Jobs consorted on. Young praised Jobs as "a pioneer of digital music, but when he went home he listened to vinyl." So Jobs clearly had an appreciation for the purity of sound that something like vinyl provides and offers a discerning music fan and his or her well-trained ear.

Given this fact, both Young and Jobs were worried about a lack of high-quality listening devices, so they mapped out new hardware that was capable of storing larger music files, which means better quality. Young has been vocal about his anti-compressed file stance, so this was obviously a passion project and labor of love for him.

With Jobs passing in October, the project has stalled, with Young admitting that not much is going on with the development of the unit. Young said, "I have to believe if [Jobs] lived long enough he would have tried to do what I'm trying to do."

Young explained what happens with compressed files, and why he is so opposed, saying, "What everybody gets [on an MP3] is 5% of what we originally make in the studio. We live in the digital age, and unfortunately it's degrading our music, not improving."

Despite that grumble, he doesn't fight the Internet and accepts that this is the reality we are living with and that musicians can't beat it, so they may as well join it, with some compromise. He realizes that the web has supplanted a traditional format like radio, saying, "I look at [the] internet as the new radio. Radio [is] gone. Piracy is the new radio; it's how music gets around."

We have to applaud Young for not stamping his feet and fighting the future. He is well within his rights to be old fashioned and to adopt an immutable stance, but instead, he’s embracing it and trying to make it work according to his “classic” standards! Kudos.