Behind old rocker Young’s vast archive offer, an intriguing idea
“Stand up for what you believe / Resist the powers that be,” declares Neil Young on “Children of Destiny,” one of the many rabble-rousing tracks on his pleasingly feisty new album with youthful backing band Promise of the Real, The Visitor.
Never one to be much confused with a conformist, anyway, the 72-year-old Can-rock icon has nevertheless been living that credo once again in a fresh and specifically technological manner since Dec. 1, when he stuck it to the music-streaming services that he’s been complaining for years are unnecessarily “devaluing” music with low-quality digital sound and put his entire catalogue up online in hi-fi-ready form for free on his exhaustive new Neil Young Archives website.
Free until June 30, anyway. At that point, “you’ll be able to sign up for a subscription at a very modest cost,” says the “thank you” email one receives after signing up.
It remains to be seen how many Neil Young devotees there are who will willingly shell out yet another monthly streaming fee on top of their Netflix and Spotify bills for continued access to this vast library of music, film, art, photography, memorabilia and more — which is monstrous and a helluva lot of fun, make no mistake, and due to keep expanding as time goes on. Or whether that means the Young catalogue will then suddenly disappear once again from other streaming services.
But Young is at least to be commended for doggedly sticking to his guns in his quest not just to break Apple’s stranglehold on the compressed industry standard for digital sound, but also for his continued insistence on demonstrating that digital sound, in and of itself, is not the ear-defiling bogeyman audiophiles often make it out to be in this vinyl-resurgent age — if it’s done right and delivered at the proper bitrate.
That’s the thing about Neil Young: he’s not a throwback when it comes to technology.
Take a look at the liner notes to, say, 1990’s Ragged Glory (which you can easily do, by the way, in the archives) and all that down-anddirty Crazy Horse skronk was proudly recorded with cutting-edge digital gear, not to tape. He launched his own crowdfunded, high-res digital music player, Pono, at the South by Southwest festival in 2014. And, while he’s a vocal enemy of how music is streamed today, he clearly also realizes where you go to reach the people these days, or he wouldn’t have chosen to promote the Dec. 1 arrival of The Visitor and the Neil Young Archives with a live-streamed concert from his former hometown of Omemee that same evening — a concert which, by the way, will be rebroadcast at 9 p.m. tonight on CTV stations.
Young seems to have changed his tune on streaming, anyway.
In April, he announced that the beleaguered Pono service, which lost its download store last year when Apple bought the company responsible for it and promptly shut it down, would be morphing into a new high-quality streaming service called XStream.
One suspects, in fact, that the Neil Young Archives site has a second function beyond preserving five decades’ worth of Neil Young’s art in one easy-to-access, “virtual” place; it’s probably also an advertisement for XStream’s capabilities, which basically allow you to access the best digital resolution that your computer and your internet connection will permit. Or, as Young wrote in a message posted to the Pono site earlier this year: “Unlike all other streaming services that are limited to playing at a single low or moderate resolution, Xstream plays at the highest quality your network condition allows at that moment and adapts as the network conditions change.”
For now, XStream’s reach appears limited to the 900 songs assembled in the Neil Young Archives, but one never knows what that subscription fee coming June 30 might also involve.
Maybe Young’s just trying to show what the product can do to see if any industry players want to come on board with the service, as those who made higher-quality downloads available to Pono — which also aimed to play back audio files at the studio-quality resolution the artist originally intended, up to and including a whopping 9,216 kilobits per second versus the Apple/ iTunes/industry standard of 256 kbps — for the past 3 1⁄ years or
2 so did.
Maybe soon XStream will emerge as a rival to Jay-Z’s high-def Tidal service. It looks like Young’s desire to keep costs down and to keep his potential customers from paying a higher price for better sound, which they had to do at the Pono store, is the main thing holding it back.
“The record labels are in the business of making money and want to make high resolution more costly to listen to than MP3s and other streams,” reads a note on the archives site. “We found that cost to be too high for XStream by NYA to offer it. So we are not able to offer all the world’s music. Technically, offering the music at its best is simple. The reason you can’t get it easily is all about money.”
I have no idea if the Neil Young Archives are the technological wonder they claim to be. My five-yearold computer is hardly powerful enough for me to notice much of a difference when the toggle switch on the archives home page is flipped between “master” quality and 320, and my network download speed apparently runs at about half the 15 mbps recommended for optimum sound.
As something for the Neil Young obsessive to sink his or her teeth into, the archives are just nuts, though, and just haphazardly put together enough that one can’t help getting lost in the “stacks,” which begin with the Squires’ 1963 single “The Sultan” and extend all the way to studio album No. 39, The Visitor, for hours at a time.
That haphazard nature is characteristically Neil — as Andy Cush put it in Spin: “It’s a treasure. But this is Neil Young we’re talking about, meaning it’s also a loopy, arcane mess whose organization defies all earthly logic” — and probably intentional, since Young himself warns in the online tutorial that’s probably worth watching before you lose your mind in the archives: “Try not to get lost.”
As a model for doing digital business outside the standard industry model, too, the Neil Young Archives are pretty spectacular.
Granted, not everyone is a musician of Neil Young’s stature, nor do most musicians of Neil Young’s stature observe the same sort of tireless work ethic he does. Still, imagine if other artists with vast stores of live recordings and unreleased material such as Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones or the late, great Prince suddenly made their entire catalogues of music, video, lyric sheets, album art and the like available for easy perusal online, at the audio quality the music was originally conceived.
If the Neil Young Archives are a hit, we could soon see other, similar projects coming online. Some of us might never leave our apartments again.
As something for the Neil Young obsessive to sink his or her teeth into, the archives are just nuts, and just haphazardly put together enough that one can’t help getting lost in the stacks