- Courtesy of Father John Misty’s Facebook page
- Father John Misty
Father John Misty, the nom de troll of Joshua Tillman (formerly of Fleet Foxes), has streamed his new album I Love You, Honeybear a full two weeks ahead of its scheduled release. Sort of. The songwriter announced a “new music platform” called SAP that’s all about hearing music on demand at no cost to either the listener or the artist. Slicked over with deeply sarcastic jargon and stock photos of young people listening to earbuds in the sun, SAP’s homepage contains a single album stream: I Love You, Honeybear. Well, not really—the album’s been stripped down to canned instrument patches and synthesized vocal sounds.
Many of Pono’s initial detractors decried the service’s high prices. Instead of a $10 download, Neil Young and company were asking users to pay $20, $30, even $40 for full albums in extrahigh audio resolution. Pono offered itself as an alternative to services like Spotify, which is free with ads and offers paid subscriptions for $10 a month. Spotify’s albums are capped at either 160 kbps (kilobytes per second) for the free service or 320 kbps for the paid one—relatively poor audio quality compared to CDs, which play back at about 1,400 kbps, the low end of Pono’s available resolutions.
