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Is Summer Becoming the New Black Friday for Sample Librariesl?

To take just one example Heavyocity FORZO is now available for $319 until the end of July. Intro price on launch (August 2018) was a discounted $399 from "full price" $549. Thus proving that you should never buy anything outside sales.

All of this - calibrate your shill alarms! - underlines what a great company Cinematic Studio is. With non-expiring loyalty discounts you are never pressured into buying and the intro price for loyal customers actually is the cheapest way to get the library. The discounts are something like 30% too, just for owning another CS library.

I'm about to come off season 1 of a project and would love to spruce up my template with additional brass and strings in the hiatus but I'm not gonna let sales pressure me... doing pretty well right now with CSS, CS2, CSB and SStW for 90% of my template.
 
I think it is good they spread the sales throughout the year. If they are all at one time, you have to limit what you buy based on your budget. Whereas when they are year round, there are more opportunities to get different stuff. I probably wouldn't buy half the stuff I get if it was only available at BF/Christmas.
 
Well, there are some interesting forces in play.

The increase in the amount of hobbyists has created a pretty big new market, and there are new customers coming online every day. Hobbyists, pros, prosumers, and every range in between.

Big developers have developed various marketing plans. EW-perpetual 50% off. Spitfire, constant new products and repackaging of the old with timely sales.

Spectrasonics doesn’t do sales, nor do Cinematic Studios (or rarely.) Same with Audio Modeling/Sample modeling. None of those release many products.

I think the most interesting marketing is going on with 8Dio, who repackage a piece of something they sampled years ago and sell it for $48. There are always new customers and also a fair amount who might have passed years ago, but will sign on for a lesser amount. Think about it- only 200 buyers equals a quick $10,000 for a few days’ sale. Quick cash infusion-nice work if you can get it.
 
Let's set the "true value" of my new POWER LEGATO ™ string library at $300.

Instead of selling to everyone at $300 - I can sell to the pros and those who "want the new shiny" now for $500. Then twice a year, I can offer it at a discounted $200 to the other end of the market. These folk are happy to get a "discount" from $500.

This way, I "sweep up" more of the potential customer base. I get more money from those who have it to spend, and collect more buyers at the other end of the market who wouldn't have been able to afford the library at it's true price.

To be clear, there's nothing particularly sinister about this. It exists everywhere, not just in sample library world.

And that's - in large part - why we have sales all of the time.
 
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To take just one example Heavyocity FORZO is now available for $319 until the end of July. Intro price on launch (August 2018) was a discounted $399 from "full price" $549. Thus proving that you should never buy anything outside sales.
Damn, this hurts...Bought Forzo way back then. I think it's a fantastic library but I never really got the chance to actually use it since it never really fit to the projects I was working on.

On a sidenote, the market is saturated, but so is my hard drive. I'm in a position where I really don't NEED more stuff. Do I want it? Sure, but I try to have myself under control now. Yes there are libraries like Spitfire's Chamber Strings and some of their Evolutions which I actually would die for since I love the sound. But right now, paying rent and food is more important ;). One day, maybe....
 
Spectrasonics doesn’t do sales, nor do Cinematic Studios (or rarely.)
Cinematic Studios have run modest sales during Black Friday in 2016, 2017, and 2018. That's the only time I'm aware of CS doing sales. Of course, once you buy one all the others are discounted, with no time limit.
 
They'd make even more money if they offered the same on their upgrade from Gold to Diamond. Never understood why they don't.
i ended up just buying it when it was 60% off. I think it was cheaper than the upgrade. Then I left the gold on my laptop.
 
Izotope recentely did a sale of stutter edit + break tweaker + all of their expansions, for a total of $48.
That's like a 90% discount
 
I'm not an economist or even very knowledgeable, and I'm certainly not an apologist for predatory business practices (that I don't see happening a lot in sample stuff, to be honest) - but from where I stand, library developers use sales and repackaging to do the same things companies selling 'real' products have been doing for decades.

@Alex Fraser (#24 in this thread) talked about "sweeping up" higher-end and lower-end customers. I completely agree, and I'd like to add that this is happening everywhere, especially in dairy (yeah, we're talking milk now, on a VI board, go figure). Milk, cream cheese, fruit yogurt - don't know about the US, but in Germany, those companies have been doing this for a long time. Different package, same content, one's € 0.49, the other's € 1.29. People who have disposable income feel 'cheap' when they buy the cheap stuff. They opt for more expensive stuff because it's 'better.' People scraping the poverty line don't have that kind of luxury. They 'win' in this case, because they get the same for less. If the more expensive (and perfectly similar) product by the same manufacturer weren't a thing, well-off customers would buy from another company. Sales lost. If the cheaper product weren't a thing, poorer customers would buy from another company. Sales lost.

In the software market, you can't do that simultaneously. You can't release AwesomeStrings Core and AwesomeStrings Pro with the exact same content, one for € 199,- and the other for € 499,-. Not at the same time. You can repackage stuff a few years down the line and have sales.

I get the frustration of people who bought at full price only to see their product go down half a year later. I also get why developers do this. The influx of hobbyists seems pretty much over from where I'm standing (could be wrong), and we're seeing a lot of competition and a saturated market.
 
Market satuation it probably a lot of it.

I remember when I first started Waves was it. And they weren't cheap like now. But on sale, you could get the Silver bundle for maybe $199, or less if you were upgrading and it has all the basics. McDSP was really good stuff and out of my price range. And we won't talk about virtual instruments. I had Reason that I managed to get into for a reasonable price. Back when it was an instrument bank. Most of the stuff was for Apple only. I didn't know about Kontakt then, but the free stuff wasn't as available as it is today.

Now, I can buy EWHO Gold for $250 or less. And there is so much stuff everywhere at really great prices. The sales in the last 3 years have gotten a lot more crazy(?). The NI NKS deals seem to have started a lot of it. And? A lot of these libraries are old. I mean think how long Symphobia has been around. So they got their money and now are trying to get back market share maybe? So maybe a mix of putting themselves back in front of new customers that have a lot more choices.

As a person with a degree in business, I can see the market is old. There is not a lot of new stuff, just slightly different, even in the music we listen to. Until technology changes enough to create really real sounding VI's that are made in a different manner than they have been or something amazingly different happens to music, it will probably continue to decline. Which is good for us hobbyists who don't have money to spend on really pricey libraries and effects.
 
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