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Has the Audio Production industry (particularly sample library sales ) peaked or still growing ?

Paul Jelfs

Senior Member
Interesting noting in some of the marketing of NI and East west the other day, that now talk about customers in "The single digit millions" , has shown how far the sampling industry has come since the days of Akai and Giga studio.

Has this industry yet to peak ? Is their still room for a lot of growth? Is it becoming saturated ?

I am just interested, and we have seen the prices fall as a result of this , since the early days of VSL , PS and East West.

But like everything there is a limit - Is the current situation sustainable, or are there too many players in this market now ?

Hopefully there is still room for everyone, it just seems in the past 2-3 years there has been an explosion of new companies in selling sample libraries.

Thoughts ?
 
Every year there are thousands of new people getting into digital music production and they want new products, I don't think there's really a peak for this kind of thing. It's like golf equipment, there's always new products released and new people taking up the sport.
 
Upsell, upsell, upsell!

The cost of landing a new customer (especially for subscription services is high). But once they are a subscriber/in your ecosystem, you need to retain them. I think a lot of growth for companies like EW will be around upselling smaller things to that existing user-base. Far easier group to market to.

Otherwise, while there may be a slow-down once you get closer to hitting your potential buyer/userbase, that's only the beginning of the story. Each customer used to have 3 libraries? Now they will want to sell you 10-15 additional libraries.

I think there is room for everyone, but you can definitely see a clamour to get as many people into your ecosystem, and then you can chill a bit and make it harder for newcomers to enter.
 
Upsell, upsell, upsell!

The cost of landing a new customer (especially for subscription services is high). But once they are a subscriber/in your ecosystem, you need to retain them. I think a lot of growth for companies like EW will be around upselling smaller things to that existing user-base. Far easier group to market to.
Definitely sounds like a lot of the music marketing courses around
 
How many downloads might the most popular free plugin have?

I know Ghosthack's free sample downloads hit 100000 downloads quite some time ago, maybe 5-6 years, probably a lot more now, and I'd think that's a small portion of the entire digital audio market. So, a couple million seems about right.

That'd also mean about one out of every couple thousand humans on this planet does digital music... plausible.
 
How many downloads might the most popular free plugin have?

I know Ghosthack's free sample downloads hit 100000 downloads quite some time ago, maybe 5-6 years, probably a lot more now, and I'd think that's a small portion of the entire digital audio market. So, a couple million seems about right.

That'd also mean about one out of every couple thousand humans on this planet does digital music... plausible.
Interesting. Didn't the LABs felt piano (or something) get a million downloads?
 
Yeah, I also remember reading that a few years ago, though it might have been all the LABS stuff put together.
 
Interesting noting in some of the marketing of NI and East west the other day, that now talk about customers in "The single digit millions" , has shown how far the sampling industry has come since the days of Akai and Giga studio.

Has this industry yet to peak ? Is their still room for a lot of growth? Is it becoming saturated ?

I am just interested, and we have seen the prices fall as a result of this , since the early days of VSL , PS and East West.

But like everything there is a limit - Is the current situation sustainable, or are there too many players in this market now ?

Hopefully there is still room for everyone, it just seems in the past 2-3 years there has been an explosion of new companies in selling sample libraries.

Thoughts ?

I think there are too many players all doing the same thing and not pushing things forward enough.

I really respect places like Performance Samples (just as an example) because they are pushing the boundaries and trying new techniques in sampling, often with fantastic results.

There are a lot of rather average libraries getting released and marketed as the second coming of jesus, that actually dont add anything to the game (or are sometimes even worse than what someone else (or sometimes even the same company itself) has already done before).

I also hate some of the over the top marketing, sales tactics and just plain bull****. I think more developers should aspire to be like cinematic studio in that respect. They keep their heads down, make brilliant products, don't partake in any self made hype or crazy marketing schemes and they keep sales and loyalty pricing reasonable, simple and consistent.
 
I think more developers should aspire to be like cinematic studio in that respect. They keep their heads down, make brilliant products, don't partake in any self made hype or crazy marketing schemes and they keep sales and loyalty pricing reasonable, simple and consistent.
I've said this before: I'm jealous of CSS's social media presence. It sure seems a lot less work than Spitfire's.

One interesting data point is the peak of Hatsune Miku's popularity. This was a long time ago, and the total market's probably gotten bigger since, but she supposedly sold an average of 300 units a week at hear peak, and i vaguely remember something about this being a significant percentage of the total music software market at the time. If we can dig that up, it'd give us an idea of the total market size a decade ago.

I also haven't paid much attention to freebie downloads, but last time I looked more into it a few years ago, had a lot of free stuff which was getting more daily downloads on average than it did when it was new - Meatbass was around 10 a day when it was a few months old, then around 40 a day a few years later, then getting close to 100 last time I checked. Marie Ork gets over 300 a day on average nowadays.
 
Definitely sounds like a lot of the music marketing courses around
yeah. There are indie artists I listen to that are actually doing this with other services including Patreon. BUT I was responding more to the idea of taking that fan and making them a repeat customer But membership sites seem to be part of the sites.
 
That'd also mean about one out of every couple thousand humans on this planet does digital music... plausible.
well, no, it means they all collect virtual instruments and sample libraries:laugh:

But in all seriousness, I've noticed people making pop music seem to be using more sample libraries nowadays - it's pretty common to hear a song and think "was that a spitfire instrument?". I don't mean pop songs with a string quartet backing, but small bits and pieces to give a song a flavor or a hook instead (a horn riff here, some epic percussion there), which is a different way of utilizing libraries sampling classical instruments from their more traditional orchestral/scoring usage.
 
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