Neil Young Trademarks New Audio Format

Rolling Stone reports that Young applied for six trademarks last June: Ivanhoe, 21st Century Record Player, Earth Storage, Storage Shed, Thanks for Listening and SQS (Studio Quality Sound). Included in the filing is a description of the trademarks: "Online and retail store services featuring music and artistic performances; high resolution music downloadable from the internet; high resolutions discs featuring music and video; audio and video recording storage and playback." 

The trademark process should take around a year, providing that there are no challenges to his application.

It's thought that the new technology will pave the way for high quality audio files to be provided to users via a cloud based system. The quality of the audio will be closer to the original studio recordings rather than the hugely compressed files that are sold on sites such as iTunes or Amazon.

(Rolling Stone)