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Spitfire Audio “This is London Calling” - BBC Symphony Orchestra

You can bet your life CH told everyone in that dev room in advance that he was going in to film his vlog, despite how spontaneous and unannounced his arrival seems. They would have been asked to hide anything related to Wednesday’s announcement.

Yep. Anything seen is likely intentional.

On some more inspection, the whiteboard we see there seems like the master plan for publishing infrastructure (stuff like replacing the journal). But I wouldn't be surprised if there's a future announcement about a larger effort for a community for media composers.
 
I do believe there’s a huge jump in musical experience to be made the following years, where recorded music and sample libraries get intertwined, allowing consumers to “play” their purchase both ways, by listening as well as creatively interacting.
 
Spitfire emailed the Alev Lenz announcement a couple of days ago. It may have been just to their SA Recordings list though.

I love the concept of it I have to say. Releasing a sample library based on an album at the same time. I remember when Blue Planet 2 was on TV and I bought the soundtrack album and Orchestral Swarm and loved that tie-in.
 
Christian is obviously hyped but I'm a bit worried by his statement of this thing may not being everyone's cup of tea ... please don't be a special interests library ...

Seems likely to be something specialty.

Consider: I like to study small companies and how they work as a hobby, and have wondered how Spitfire is doing it. Look at their staff, it's huge, and they've remodeled and moved. They've got people doing specialty jobs that a company 100 times their size wouldn't have, I remember a "event planner" to help employees feel part of the (small) company.

Compare to EastWest which has an equal or I think bigger catalog. They co-run a studio, and keep the two running by having a subscription revenue stream along with a studio revenue stream. I would guess their software business has no more than a dozen people working for it.

In the US a young software engineer costs about $150k/year including overhead. I can't imagine London is much cheaper these days, call it $100k/year/employee average and 10 people gives you a million dollar budget. They've got way more than that.

Clearly they had a capital infusion from investors, but somehow they have to grow, and given samples are a limited market that inevitably means coming out with lots of specialty things. And lo and behold they already do that with all of these "Hans ZImmer XYZ" composer libraries. Not my cup of tea for sure, in a sample library I want tools, not something that comes with a personality.
 
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Clearly they had a capital infusion from investors, but somehow they have to grow, ...

I believe they took venture funding in early 2017. Maybe they are going public :)

Of course, as Spitfire Audio appears to be profitable, they would never go public in the US :geek:
 
I believe they took venture funding in early 2017. Maybe they are going public :)

Of course, as Spitfire Audio appears to be profitable, they would never go public in the US :geek:

Sampling has a small audience and a limited product space. There are maybe 30-50 instruments that people need sampled, beyond that it's just flavor of the month. Spitfire's approach is boutique offerings, unusual recording studio (Air with that nutty reverb that the studio does its best to damp) and composer branded libraries. CH has managed to build up a following which helps. Anyhow their business model doesn't look sustainable FWIW, I wonder how they pitched it to the VC's.
 
Sampling has a small audience and a limited product space. There are maybe 30-50 instruments that people need sampled, beyond that it's just flavor of the month. Spitfire's approach is boutique offerings, unusual recording studio (Air with that nutty reverb that the studio does its best to damp) and composer branded libraries. CH has managed to build up a following which helps. Anyhow their business model doesn't look sustainable FWIW, I wonder how they pitched it to the VC's.
It seems that their plan is to diversify into other areas of the music industry.
 
2 1/2 years after a round is about when the VCs start nagging you create a liquidity event or at least raise a second round. Fun to speculate ...
 
It seems that their plan is to diversify into other areas of the music industry.

Yeah but what I wonder? I don't buy the idea of releasing albums alongside VI's being profitable. The public doesn't care about VI's, and if they did wouldn't know what to do with it.

2 1/2 years after a round is about when the VCs start nagging you create a liquidity event or at least raise a second round. Fun to speculate ...

Software projects run on 3 year timeframes these years (I remember when it was 10 years!) So yeah I could see building a project idea for six months or so, going to VC's and getting a chunk of change with a pitch for <GREAT NEW IDEA>, staffing/relocating up the project with a release now. That parts rings true - hard to see VC money on the idea that they've just been doing well so far, you have to show a growth path.

OK, enough free marketing for Spitfire, time to hit <forgetaboutitdoesn'tmatter>!
 
Since Spitfire seem to like doing colors libraries and phrase-y libraries more and more, I hope that it's not more of that. And I hope it has nothing to do with networking composers or releasing projects created on Spitfire or something like that.

One thing I was wondering about, though - if this is a BBC product, what if it's a license to have access to samples of BBC players that pays the players more than just for the original session? Sort of a "here's our massive library. The best library ever. It costs x to get in the door but x isn't too much - but if you use it in a commercial situation you have to pay again - so the musicians see a bit more money, but your initial costs are low, and if you are making money with music you can afford it." I mean, I doubt it's that, but I wonder if anyone would ever do that.
 
Consider: I like to study small companies and how they work as a hobby
A "young" (junior?, graduate?) software engineer in London is closer to $30-50k/year depending on various factors - Even a senior software developer is usually on much less than $100k+. A quick google of Spitfire Audio jobs finds that they recently advertised a PHP senior developer role for $70k and a senior front-end developer for $60k. For the kinds of rates you're talking about, you're looking at very specialized, very experienced engineers with high pressure jobs, who are on daily contracts. Also, not sure I'd call Spitfire a 'small company' nowadays - a 2019 picture on their website shows 60+ staff and I'd imagine that doesn't include everyone.
 
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