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Neil Young On Steve Jobs: "When He Went Home, He Listened To Vinyl"

5:51 p.m. · January 31, 2012 · by David Padula

Neil Young's distate for MP3s is documented and deserved. You don't have to be an audio snob to know that the format is garbage and compresses the sound you hear with blurring effect. While on D: Dive Into Media, Young complained that MP3 files only give listeners about five percent of the total sound; Apple's format, he said, was hardly a step-up, only offering listeners "10.3 percent." He expressed his hope that "some rich guy" will still come along and let fans hear all of the sound contained in a file.

"Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, his legacy was tremendous," Young also said, "But when he went home, he listened to vinyl." He feels that Jobs could have gotten listeners to his sound-quality utopia had his life not been cut short in October of last year. Young touched on piracy as well, saying he's not too concerned with it affecting artists' distribution. Actually, he's more concerned that pirated music is generally of such a low quality. Regarding this, he said, "It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone...Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around." [TheVerge]