Neil Young's New High Resolution Streaming Service

On April 22nd 2017, music legend, Neil Young announced that he will be starting a new music streaming service called, Xstream. The move comes as a result of the shut down of his of his Pono Music store in the summer of 2016. Pono is the high resolution music player that Mr Young introduced to the world in 2015. Mr. Young's goal is to create a streaming service that will deliver 24bit 192kHz sound quality at what he calls, "a normal price."

Mr. Young says that Xstream will not be like most of the other streaming music services. Xtream won't use a single low resolution file. Instead, Xstream will stream the highest quality sound based on your internet connection. The file that is streamed will also adapt to any changes in your network. This is done by using a single high resolution, bit perfect file that is compressed as it is needed so that it will never stop playing.

The adaptive stream technology was created by Orastream, a small tech company in Singapore that Mr. Young worked with to conceptualize Xstream. Xstream will not be compatible with the existing Pono players because they don't have a Wi-Fi adapter and only play downloads. Currently, Mr. Young is in talks with the major record companies, so only his music is being listed as available for streaming. No launch date has been given at this time.