Photo by Matt Furman
Neil Young has big plans for December 1st. In addition to releasing his new album, The Visitor, the classic rocker has now revealed plans to open up a full archive of his music. Better yet, it will initially be available for free.
In a recent Facebook post, Young stated, “[The archive is] a place you can visit and experience every song I have ever released in the highest quality your machine will allow. It’s the way it’s supposed to be. In the beginning, everything is free.”
A lengthy note on Neil Young Archives goes into further detail about the endeavor, explaining that it uses Xstream Music high resolution streaming by OraStream. The format purportedly “adapts seamlessly” to available bandwidth in order to deliver “the best audio quality possible, directly from the original high resolution masters.”
Read more:
— Neil Young’s Top 10 Songs
— The 25 Best Neil Young Covers
— The Very Best of Neil Young
“Xstream Music master recordings are always pure uncompressed masters,” Young writes. “They are not part of a format that compromises the quality. All compression formats compromise quality.”
The archive will also detail Young’s extensive discography with a Timeline feature cataloging every single recorded track or album he’s ever produced. There’s also a Filing Cabinet organizing all the songs in chronological order, complete with Info Cards containing associated credits, memorabilia, films or video, press, and photographs.
As Young notes, it’s a “living document” with information still being added and he created the site “for myself as much as for everyone else.”
