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Neil Young: Steve Jobs Preferred Listening to Vinyl

Neil Young: Steve Jobs Preferred Listening to Vinyl

Steve Jobs may have taken the music industry by storm, but according to musician Neil Young, speaking in an interview with Walt Mossberg and Peter Kafka, he still preferred listening to vinyl records on his own time.

Steve Jobs as a pioneer of digital music and his legacy is tremendous. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl. And you’ve got to believe that if he’d lived long enough, he would have done what I’m trying to do.

Young believes that the digital music movement has actually degraded the quality of our music over time, and strives to restore the quality of our audio. Young points out that modern MP3s contain only a fraction of the sound data in a master recording.

Even more interesting, Bloomberg reports that Neil Young actually worked with Steve Jobs on a high-fidelity music service before Apple ultimately ended up scrapping the project.

While chief executive officer of Apple, Jobs sought to offer uncompressed music digitally, Young said today at an AllThingsD.com media conference in Dana Point, California. Apple “pretty much” has stopped working on the project, said Young, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who is known for the songs “Harvest Moon” and “Heart of Gold.”

I find it extremely interesting that Steve Jobs, like many who truly get into the experience of music at its fullest, still appreciated, and even at times preferred old vinyl records over the digital alternatives he helped shape.