Neil Young and John Huey Talk Music Quality at Brainstorm:TECH

By Kyle Austin

John Huey, Editor-In-Chief of TIME Inc. just wrapped-up Fortune Brainstorm: TECH by chatting with Neil Young (yes that Neil Young). Here are some excerpts, from the first part of their chat on music quality:

John Huey: We have 25 minutes to vet this treasure trove, so we’ll try do our best. He just said to me before we came out here that you have to watch what you say because it will stick with you for 20 years. I often say that rust doesn’t sleep; which is the only way to edit and I think the two tie together nicely.

Neil hasn’t disappeared. He’s been around a lot lately with his movies and he also recently wrote a song with the subtle title “Let’s Impeach the President.” I ran across this anecdote about him that I thought you would find interesting.

I have a friend that works at West Point and each year they have a artist perform for the graduating cadets. They ask the performer if they would be wiling to wave their fee for the young men going into service for their country. The only person ever to wave his fee was Neil Young. Go figure a left wing, Canadian rock star was the only one to wave their fee. Neil was kind of embarrassed when I brought this up to him and said no one is supposed to know this.

OK, let’s talk about the industry that brought you here. In the area of music. No industry has been more disrupted by technology then music. You, unlike anyone else, have been working for 15 years on an alternative digital platform. You were upset with the quality of CD’s for sometime and your feeling is that it has gotten worse from there?

Neil Young:It went downhill from there. I loved the CD when it came out. It was great for music to go to that little disk and it was very convenient. But that same convenience has been taken advantage of. Apple especially, has taken that convenience to an extreme and ignored quality. Quality is not there. I’m trying to figure out a way. Especially a play in the PC Market. I think PC makers can overlook the area of quality music on PC’s. PC hardware should include software to listen to higher resolution music. So we are not stuck with the Apple or MP3 standard. A model for a company that provides hi-res song listening is something that I am certainly pursuing.

The problem with all of this is there is no way to play back music at the resolution that it was created at. It will only play back in CD quality. This sounds a lot better then MP3 but it is not hi-res. That is not what we are capable of. It seems like the ability to listen to hi-res music is one of the missing elements in consumer technology. Any designer of PC’s that I can talk to, I will be pushing for that.

I record now in a way that can be bumped in an even higher-res. I always record at the highest-res of digital I can. We are getting better and better at recording but the quality is not there in playback.

JH: Do they believe the consumer can be lead there?

NY:I’ve never heard the quality of music mentioned. That is what made music so great. If you bought music that you could see, it would be like watching the lowest-res movie. Because you can’t view it, you can’t see that it’s lower then what it could be. The content is important but at the expense of quality; that is too big of a price to pay. Especially for me and my peers that try to create music that will last forever.

JH: Have you discussed with Apple and Steve Jobs?

NY: I’ve discussed this with Michael Dell who is checking with his folks to see what they can do.

What do you think? Do you want higer-res music that sounds live?  As we’ve learned this week at Brainstorm: Tech the industry is certainly open to your ideas. Including Michael Dell.

2 comments July 23rd, 2008

Can ‘Green’ Save the U.S. Postal Service? Probably Not

By Ben

The New York Times reports that the U.S. Postal Service is encouraging people and businesses to keep the environment in mind when mailing documents and packages. They’ve even trademarked the term environMAIList. How much is this green initiative just one last attempt to survive?

Twenty years ago almost everything came was delivered by a post office employee – from magazines, bills, letters, business documents, and of course, credit card advertisements. Today, it seems like we’re just stuck with the credit card advertisements.

Email and the internet have dramatically changed the way we receive mail and news. Newspapers are a whole other issue – but the amount of people having them delivered to their doorstop has completely changed as well. But what has happened over the past 20 years?

The days when you would send a friend a letter, postcard, or other kind of note to say hi are long gone. This week’s delay of correspondence has turned into email, IM, text messages, and social networks like Facebook. After all, why send a postcard in the mail when you can just post all of your vacation pictures on Facebook with captions underneath, and a nice message saying that you’re having a great time?

The content from magazines has all been put online, and bills/payments have all become automatic withdrawals or are done through online banking. Email has completely changed business as well, as anyone would be hard pressed to find someone who uses mail as a first, second, or even third option for business communication.

So how will this green effort help the U.S. Postal Service? Probably very little, if at all. The mail business isn’t falling behind because of the environment, but because technology, innovation, and the internet have dramatically changed the way we go about communicating.

2 comments July 23rd, 2008

Nicholas Negroponte at Brainstorm: TECH

By Kyle Austin

Nicholas Negroponte took the stage with David Kirkpatrick at Fortune Brainstorm: TECH to address the crowd on where the One Laptop per Child project currently stands earlier this morning. Some excerpts below:

DK: Happy to have you on stage, along with your XO.

You have transformed a new way to get technology into the hands of kids across the world. However, you’ve often talked about goals that haven’t been achieved. How do you describe the state of OLPC?

NN: You need a certain amount of hype. Some of it was that. We had to change our targets as we began to see which countries really were going to put a full effort behind one laptop for every child in their country. Peru is going to do a million this year. If I was running a company that would be pretty good to go from $0-$200 million (if they were paying for each computer) in one market - in one year.

DK: Do you sometimes wish that you had made it a business and not a non-profit philanthropy effort?

NN:Never. What the non-profit does is create the mission for us. We don’t look at the developing world as a market, we look at it as a mission. When I go to each head of state they know that I am talking with them about a mission to transform education in their countries and not giving them a sales’ speech. It also allows us to attract the top talent that want to be part of a true mission, without even thinking about earning a salary.

DK: So the XO that you have with you does something different then the XO’s in the developing world right now?

NN:Yes, this is a dual-boot XO that runs both Windows and Linux (Negroponte boots in Windows for the crowd).

NN: We will kick-off a global “Give One, Get One” program within the next few months.

Disclosure: One Laptop per Child is a client of the Racepoint Group.

July 23rd, 2008