Thousands sign up for the rock veteran’s high quality digital music service and player.

The Kickstarter campaign to launch Neil Young’s Pono music player has attracted over $1 million from eager backers in under 24 hours, with music fans pledging up to $5000 each to get their hands on the high quality player plus bundles of extras (including, at the top end, a ‘VIP dinner’ with Neil himself).

Most of the pledges will result in a purchase of the first edition Pono Player, an appealingly chunky prism-shaped device that plays top-quality FLAC music files. The standard 128Gb players cost $300 each via Kickstarter, a saving of $99 from the expected retail price.

For $400 you can nab one of  the ‘artist signature series’ models, which come with laser-engraved signatures and a couple of pre-loaded favourite albums from artists including Beck, Patti Smith, Foo Fighters, CSNY and Arcade Fire.

The device connects to the Pono Music App and Pono Music store, where you can buy and download music. The tracks will be CD quality at minimum, while certain music will have an “ultra-high resolution” of 9216 kbps.

There’s no launch date for the online store yet, but Pono Players are expected to begin production for the general market in late summer 2014.

Watch the Kickstarter video: