Neil Young trademarks music format, online store

Musicians Frank Sampedro (L) and Neil Young perform onstage at the 2012 MusiCares Person of the Year Tribute to Paul McCartney held at the Los Angeles Convention Center on February 10, 2012 in Los Angeles, California.

/ Larry Busacca/Getty Images

(CBS News) Musician Neil Young may make good on a plan to work on a high-quality music format, as well as a means of distribution.

Steve Jobs was working on next iPod with Neil Young

According to documents filed at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Young applied for six trademarks in June 2011, Rolling Stone reports. The nature of the trademarks suggests that Young is planning to develop a music format to rival current industry standards, like MP3 or AAC.

Young also filed for a trademark that suggests a possible music distribution service, as well. The description from the USPTO office states: "Online and retail store services featuring music and artistic performances, high resolution music downloadable from the internet, high resolutions discs featuring music and video, and pre-recorded digital media featuring audio and video recordings for storage and playback."

Plans for a high-quality music format may have been in the works for years. Young revealed he was working with the late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, on the next iPod in February at an All Things D conference.

According to Young, Jobs wanted to create a format that had 20 times the fidelity of current electronic music files. Young claims, Apple's AAC format only holds 5 percent of the full recorded data, while compact discs hold about 15 percent.

"Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music. His legacy is tremendous," Young said. "But when he went home, he listened to vinyl," Young said at the "D: Dive Into Media" conference in February.

Jobs and Young agreed there was a lack of high-quality music formats. They wanted to work on new hardware that was capable of storing files with 100 percent of the data recorded in a studio. The only problem is a music file of that caliber would take 30 minutes to download one song.

"I talked to Steve about it. We were working on it," Young said. "You've got to believe if he lived long enough he would eventually try to do what I'm trying to do."

The "D: Dive Into Media" conference was held my All Things D. Co-executive editor Walt Mossberg, interviewed Young and confirmed Jobs' sentiment over digital music.

[rightbing]

Well, us audiophiles are a strange bunch. "High res." audio sounds great in principle. Whats not to like about more data? The issue is, there has not been consistent 'quality' in the high res. offerings. I bought Paul McCartney's 'Band on the Run' in 24/96 download from Hdtracks. Fair at best. The Beatles 2009 remasters in redbook sound better. I upsample my redbook to 24/96 with Sox anyway. Sure it doesnt have the amount of data as a native 24/96. It sounds fantastic. High res. is the future in digital music for audiophiles for sure. It cant be debated. As far as the vinyl fans go. Its all digital until it gets transferred to vinyl. Makes no sense. Just process the digital correctly. Skip the vinyl.

[Scimajor]

If we consider for a moment that Mr. Young is comparing Analog to Digital, it's not exaggerating to say that the percentages he uses are at best contrived and at worst completely false.

If we're going to nitpick, analog signals have infinite resolution so it would take an infinite sample rate to completely capture all the data. It would therefore be more accurate to say that digital recordings have approximately 0% of the data original signal. It therefore doesn't take an IQ of 180 to realize that comparing analog is digital in this manner is meaningless.

The real test is simply to listen to an analog recording and a digital recording and compare the two. Even that is difficult given that analog signals ALWAYS have pops and hisses and digital recordings effectively have none of those.

It's snake oil people.