April 10
th, 2014 – Santa Monica, California – With five days left in their Kickstarter funding initiative, Neil Young and the PonoMusic team are now the third most funded campaign in Kickstarter history at $5.75M as of today.
“We are so excited about hitting this milestone. This campaign has exceeded our expectations from the start. By taking the nontraditional crowdfunding approach, we have been able to unveil PonoMusic our way – directly to our customers. The PonoMusic Kickstarter campaign now has over 16,000 active backers and we’ve received over 5,000 comments, questions, and suggestions on the site. This is incredibly valuable consumer feedback and we will be a much better company at launch because of the engagement from the PonoMusic community” said PonoMusic CEO, John Hamm.
Less than 10 hours after launching their Kickstarter campaign on March 11th, the team surpassed their $800,000 goal; at the 24-hour mark, they hit $2 million. Since then, Young and the PonoMusic team have been heavily involved with their Kickstarter audience, fielding questions, comments, and concerns in order to share the full experience with their supporters. The team has also engaged their audience by explaining the feeling behind the PonoMusic experience via constantly updated imagery; video testimonials from both renowned artists and young people in Los Angeles; and weekly updates from Hamm and Young.
“Pono is an ecosystem to play and store music. This is not a format; the experience is not about recognizing a song, it’s about feeling it,” says Young, who came up with the idea over three years ago. He and his team have been chasing the dream of bringing the soul back into music ever since.
On the Kickstarter campaign, backers are being offered PonoPlayers as rewards in yellow and black. A roster of top musicians also took part in the campaign by authorizing the highly coveted limited editions “Artist Signature Series,” that have their signatures etched onto the players. Artists who participated include Elton John, the Eagles, Kings of Leon, Emmylou Harris, Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Pearl Jam, Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, Crosby Stills & Nash, and more. Other rewards range from stickers and t-shirts to exclusive PonoMusic listening parties around the country with Neil Young.
Now in its last week, a final reward has been added at the backers’ request: the PonoClear, a PonoPlayer with transparent casing to fully view its inner details, pre-loaded with a PonoMusic sampler specially curated by our founding team.
