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Audiobro Modern Scoring Brass (MSB)

I'm glad Jim that you mentioned total sales in your post and inserted a bit of reality into the thread. I aways cringe a bit when reading these speculation posts on costs because there seems to be this feeling from some folks on the forum that sample developers are these large "companies" and that this market they sell to is way bigger then it really is. They aren't and the market is extremely small/niche. When I read some of the posts it makes me think we believe these companies are the size of General Electric! I believe every sale for a sample developer is pretty important for them and most of the sample developers are probably more like one or two man operations. But because of the wonders of Photoshop, websites and Final Cut Pro the marketing image projected might make one think they are much bigger. When I worked for Ensoniq we only had or needed for that matter something like 6 or 7 regional sales reps for the entire United States and this was at the height of our sales of the Mirage and EPS. The DX7 was an anomaly and sold 200,000 units and I think they still hold the record. No one came close to that in sales and I know we did not (and we were considered a big company at NAMM by the size of our booth in relation to others) and these keyboard type products we sold would appeal to way more people like the Church Market, Studios, Schools, Weekend Warriors, Students, and Professional Musicians (The smallest market btw) then someone willing to spend $700 for a download of digitized violin recordings so they can compose with "True Legato" :) Yes I know Spitfire is a tiny bit of an exception because they have a few people on staff but keep in mind it wasn't too long ago that Paul and Christian were answering tech support questions. Accoring to Wikapedia Moog sold 12,000 Minimoog synthesizers in 11 years. That's about 20 sales a week and I wonder if that number would be on the high side for a sample developer averaging out over the life of a specific library.

Sure, you might be right, I dont have hard facts to suggest otherwise. I would only argue that we’re not talking about $3500 synthesizers in the 80s. The market and world is very different now in the internet age after the great democratization of the music industry. Production is different, supply is different. Now that everyone and their mother can create music in their bedroom that 30 years ago would have needed a $100,000 in recording equipment, it means that there are exponentially more people trying to do it. I can’t help but see the meteoric drop in prices of high end libraries we’ve seen in just the last 5-10 years as evidence of that.

Yes, spitfire may be a relative outlier but their YouTube channel has over 50,000 subscribers. Just peruse YouTube and there is what seems (to me) and infinite number of channels showing their off production music, publishing tutorials, doing reviews etc etc. And all of just sample libraries.

No one is suggesting these companies are the size of GE but in 2018 you don’t have to be more than a handful of people to create and sell 10,000 units of a sample library.

Even on vi control I’ve personally noticed that every year or so there is a whole new “generation” of members contributing.
 
Yes, I think people underestimate the current size of the market, especially over the last 5 years when it has moved down into what you'd call the "prosumer" level.

Look at the number of people reading just this forum at any given time.

If you have a good product that appeals to a fair percentage of the VI market, and a good brand name to go with it, the current market could support volumes a lot higher than 4-5 years ago, and hence much lower costs. This seems to be bourne out by Spitfire's approach at least.

I make no predictions of their pricing though. :cautious: (Please be cheap!)
 
Sure, you might be right, I don't have hard facts to suggest otherwise. I would only argue that we’re not talking about $3500 synthesizers in the 80s. The market and world is very different now in the internet age after the great democratization of the music industry. Production is different, supply is different. Now that everyone and their mother can create music in their bedroom that 30 years ago would have needed a $100,000 in recording equipment, it means that there are exponentially more people trying to do it. I can’t help but see the meteoric drop in prices of high end libraries we’ve seen in just the last 5-10 years as evidence of that.

Yes, spitfire may be a relative outlier but their YouTube channel has over 50,000 subscribers. Just peruse YouTube and there is what seems (to me) and infinite number of channels showing their off production music, publishing tutorials, doing reviews etc etc. And all of just sample libraries.

No one is suggesting these companies are the size of GE but in 2018 you don’t have to be more than a handful of people to create and sell 10,000 units of a sample library.

Even on vi control I’ve personally noticed that every year or so there is a whole new “generation” of members contributing.
I hear you Prodigalson and completely agree with you on alot of what you said especially your point that the amount of money one needs to create music has dropped significantly which I also contend killed the studio business that used to exist all over the world along with Napster that killed the recording industry as we used to know it (check out drummer Vinny Caluiatta's talk on YouTube about that, it's eye opening) but a few things to maybe consider. Your point regarding "$3500 synths" in the 80's is high..at Ensoniq we knew very well what the "magic number" was to stay in business and that was $1500 or lower and so did Yamaha btw. The three men I worked for that started the company knew the ropes of marketing technology really well as prior to their venture creating Ensoniq they had brought the Commodore 64 computer to mass market rather successfully. We knew a higher price would not sell and we had our eyes on Emu Systems and were getting our sales based on our number as at that time their product was around 10K. I traveled quite extensively for many years granted it was some years back :) and my experience was the market for this stuff is really small from the way I see it bantered about by some on VI Control. Before I did all the traveling I admit I thought it was waaaay bigger. Have you ever wondered why even today companies like Korg, Yamaha and Roland have never ventured in any significant way into creating, marketing and selling sample libraries? I mean trust me they have the resources, know how and people to to do this... they don't because they know that market is way smaller then the small market they have to sell to in which they package "their sample libraries" in a hardware based product. And please don't get me wrong I think the sample developers are great and have great respect for them, I believe they have an extremely time intensive job and take on a huge amount of risk for the potential financial reward of in reality who they can sell their finished product to.
 
Your point regarding "$3500 synths" in the 80's is high..at Ensoniq we knew very well what the "magic number" was to stay in business and that was $1500 or lower and so did Yamaha btw.

Ok but I was simply referencing the current cost of the keyboard, the minimoog, you used as a comparative example. Also, the DX7 according to Wikipedia cost $1,995 in 1983 an equivalent of over $5,000 today.

Again, you may well be right but I don't think you can take the reluctance of a handful of traditional hardware companies to throw themselves into sample library development as definitive proof (although Roland has been investing in development of it's "Cloud") because there are dozens more companies that have arrived in the last 5-10 years doing specifically that and it seems more and more every week. When I started using sample libraries 6 years ago the only real contenders were EW, Garritan, ProjectSAM and VSL. Cinesamples was brand new with Cinebrass, Spitfire was relatively new with Albion and a couple other libraries. Now we have Orchestral Tools and so many more. These companies obviously believe there is a strong market for their products. Whoever was the angel investor recently capitalizing Spitfire Audio obviously did the math and saw a worthwhile investment.

Another thing. VI Control in the last year or so has felt like much less of an informational, technique based forum as much as it is endless discussions and comparisons of the latest thing on the market. We don't discuss using libraries we just talk about which one we should buy next. I've long thought the tag line of the forum should now be "Musicians helping musicians spend money".
 
I was just talking to a sample developer at the January, 2018 NAMM and he is about ready to get out of the business as he doesn't make any money. He is one of the original companies that has been around for 20 years. Piracy has hit his business heavily.

Spitfire may have 50,000 followers but how many of those people pirate their libraries. Of those 50,000 followers, most have only purchased a few of their libraries. I currently only have one of their libraries.

As mentioned before, most of the companies are only 1-2 employees and may hire part-time help to program. Some of the bigger companies such Orchestral Tools probably only have about 4-5 employees.

I remember a booth I worked in at NAMM that the company only had 1 full-time employee but brought on extra people to do demos that wore company shirts so it made the company look bigger. This was a common practice with many of the companies.

Jim
 
Seeing what OT put out this year, I'd say there's at least 15 employees.

I read here recently that VSL has over 70,000 customers (probably including VEP).

Piracy is a big problem. That's one of the reasons SF is developing their own player, and probably why OT will announce that they are moving to Halion (speculation on my part).
 
Seeing what OT put out this year, I'd say there's at least 15 employees.

I read here recently that VSL has over 70,000 customers (probably including VEP).

Piracy is a big problem. That's one of the reasons SF is developing their own player, and probably why OT will announce that they are moving to Halion (speculation on my part).
But that hopefully won't be their "groundbreaking announcement". I think everyone will be dissapointed because I think everyone prefers Kontakt and they expect a new cool library!
 
Piracy is a big problem. That's one of the reasons SF is developing their own player, and probably why OT will announce that they are moving to Halion (speculation on my part).
I don't know. It would be weird to have done that NI sale and ported all their stuff to NKS only then to shift to Halion. But who knows? OT's business practices often strike me as odd, so this would fit right into that.

I think CH said on one of his vlogs that Spitfire had more than 40 employees.
 
That's one of the reasons of the big OT sales of recent, they won't be revisiting those libraries, and they're leaving the platform (again, all speculation on my part)

Pretty sure SF has around 65 employees...
 
That's one of the reasons of the big OT sales of recent, they won't be revisiting those libraries, and they're leaving the platform (again, all speculation on my part)

Pretty sure SF has around 65 employees...
But why pay to update them to NKS if they are abandoning them?
 
Steinberg just hired OT as a full time, in-house, sample development team, exclusively for their Halion Platform, provided they stop developing for NI Kontakt. Hehe.. Just a crazy thought ;) :)
 
Looking forward to the release of Audiobro's Modern Scoring Brass (MSB) in Q1-2019, and LASS 3 during Q2 or Q3 2019. I know I will be buying both of these libraries, hopefully the price is reasonable. :2thumbs:
 
Steinberg just hired OT as a full time, in-house, sample development team, exclusively for their Halion Platform, provided they stop developing for NI Kontakt. Hehe.. Just a crazy thought ;) :)
What an interesting hypothesis! I think OT always wanted to do the best. If that's true what you say, we'll soon see and hear that Halion far surpasses the Kontakt Sampler. I'm curious ... . :)
 
What an interesting hypothesis! I think OT always wanted to do the best. If that's true what you say, we'll soon see and hear that Halion far surpasses the Kontakt Sampler. I'm curious ... . :)

I have almost zero experience with Halion... what are some of the strengths compared to Kontakt?
 
I got out ye ol' calculator, they've probably spent somewhere between $500k and $1million on this one.

Calculator? which one? LOL

I don't have prices, but there's no way it can cost anywhere near that.

Think about how much the hall is for the day, how much each musician is for the day, and how much material there is.

I am not saying it was 20k - no way. But half a mil? No way.
 
Firstly, I’m excited by the potential of this library on paper. Just keeping my powder dry for now until we see/hear something more concrete. I could easily see me having both MSB and CSB (over time). Whether I need something like MSB is another discussion entirely, but for now, I’m very interested.

Secondly on discussions around the size of potential market (I have no hard data, only more speculation) is MSB’s market size potentially impacted by the fact it’s an Orchestral library? I could be wrong (see above) but it seems that a lot of the online resources around producing and writing are for modern pop/edm/hip-hop and relatively little is focused on Orchestral music. Sometimes you can extrapolate but not always. Does this mean the potential market for a product like MSB is sliced even thinner? Maybe the naming of the library is self-aware in that regard and trying to widen its appeal. Maybe it will have articulations and a sound that could be useful to a pop writer.

Time will tell, I guess.

Oh, and a very happy new year to everyone on VI-C.
 
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