Tech blog (Richard Waters): When I met legendary rocker Neil Young recently, he was pretty disparaging about iTunes. It's like all new digital media technologies, he said: great for convenience, but the sound quality sucks. (Since I have a tin ear when it comes to music, I'll leave others to judge the validity of that comment. But Peter Gabriel, another musician who has been working on new ideas for distributing digital music, agrees.)
Young let slip that he was now talking to record companies about licensing an alternative digital platform that he had been working on - something, he claimed, of far higher quality that could provide an alternative to the download world and perhaps even a new business model for music. The technology behind this was first shown off last month at Sun's JavaOne conference. Young, who is something of a techie, has spent 15 years experimenting with different technologies to assemble a complete archive of his career. He is now finally ready to release the first multimedia instalment. It will come out on Blu-ray discs, with the capability of adding extra content in future through downloads.
