The year was 2013 and Neil Young was preparing to launch his PONO high resolution music player and download service. I was left wondering how this new technology thrust might impact plans for the release of Archives Volume 2, the follow-up to his 2009 landmark Blu-ray tour-de-force Archives Volume 1. This would not be the first time his Archives would be delayed by a format change, having gone through the stillborn HDCD and DVD-A iterations prior to landing on Blu-ray. But then, in a European interview, Neil threw us a curve ball mentioning that Volume 2 would be made “suitable for computers”.

Four years later, the “computer” version of NYA launched online in late 2017. We were gifted an experience that had all the familiarity of the Blu-ray disks: the high resolution music, a browsable file cabinet, and a timeline, but it was untethered from physical media and had a much friendlier user interface. Furthermore, it was a completely free subscription, dishing up around 660 streaming songs. But I quickly came to realize that what we had on Day One, though a generous offering, was woefully incomplete. A huge portion of Neil’s released works were unplayable. The entirety of the Geffen Years, the Atlantic releases (CSNY), the Buffalo Springfield Box Set (Rhino), all the covers Neil did, Eldorado, Journey Through The Past, and numerous other minor releases such as singles were missing. And forget NYA Volume 2 -- not even the bonus contents from Volume 1 were there.

I catalogued the online contents of NYA, comparing it against Neil’s known body of work and then sent my wish lists to NYA. Most, if not all, of my suggestions were previously released items. I noticed that, among the fandom, I was just about alone in my desire for the previously released contents to be included in NYA. Most fans had much more interesting, unreleased things to request. When Neil proposed delaying Eldorado, for example, to add unreleased tracks to it, my stomach got knotted up. Not the typical fan response! To me with my OCD, I really needed NYA to be all the complete and accurately represented released works of Neil Young, first and foremost. It turns out that, even on the major streaming sites, this is easier said than done.

Over time, Neil’s released history started to get fleshed out on NYA. As the service went behind a tiered paywall, Dead Man and the Geffen albums were added in 2018. Don’t Spook The Horse, the CSNY catalogue and non-Neil penned covers were completed in 2019 at the time the NYA mobile app was released. The CGS version of Neil Young (first album) was added in 2020. Dead Man single, A Letter Home: Clean Tape Feed and the Buffalo Springfield Box Set (Rhino) were all added in 2021. Where The Buffalo Roam (soundtrack) and Eldorado were added in 2022. During this timeframe, album after album was upgraded from CD audio resolution to high-resolution audio on NYA as well.

Thankfully, while I have been pushing for these released items, others have been requesting live concerts, outtakes and movies. Neil’s frequently updated Letters To The Editor column in his ever-growing Times-Contrarian NYA newspaper has enabled this. 2021 was a watershed year at NYA for the introduction of Timeline Concerts (fan requests), Movietone (video on demand) and Outtakes! In many ways, this is the real story of NYA: how Neil engages with fans to make NYA’s content and features complete. What has this engagement netted? By the numbers, we have 30 timeline concerts, 210 videos on-demand, and 71 outtakes/demos, many of which are not available anywhere else. That’s not to mention the greater than 3,000 other viewable assets on the site.

But back to my OCD. With the recent inclusion of Journey Through The Past, NYA is now complete in terms of his major releases on all labels. That is a beautiful thing to me. I just never foresaw and appreciated how long it would take to get all of the diverse licensing deals in place across multiple record labels and publishing companies. In terms of the number of listenable tracks, those have more than doubled to a count of 1,423 as of today! Anyone other than Neil would probably have folded long before achieving this milestone. And did I mention that as of last week the NYA iOS app now supports Apple CarPlay?

Looking back now, ten years after its inception and five years after its launch, I think it was smart for NYA to open as it was – incomplete -- when it did. NYA led the charge into high resolution streaming when no other service was doing it. Now there are many such offerings, from Amazon to Qobuz and beyond. The fact that all of Neil’s original releases, and many new things, are now streaming at NYA is nothing short of amazing to me. I want members to take a look again at what they have -- and appreciate all the effort that went into it. NYA has been at the intersection of art, business and community for the last five years. It has been a dance like no other. Now I’m ready for NYA to shed light on the darker corners and untold stories of Neil’s creative output. That is, until Neil opens a virtual, fully rendered Archives Barn in the Metaverse!