I don't put much faith in NI's future.

1. They have a track record of betraying customers even when the company was in good financial shape (remember Kore?).

2. They were already in trouble even before incurring that big debt. Remember the 2019 drama?

3. They have no sane plan regarding where to steer the company. Investors want growth, while the market is saturated, the competition offers better solutions for less money, and none of NI products is "the best in the industry" anymore.

4. NI went the Waves way: quantity over quality. Every other version of Komplete is stuffed with more and more plugins that people don't even use - just to make an impression of "bigger value". Same with Kontakt itself - it became a monster, full of unnecessary things like mediocre amp sims etc., while doing such fundamental thing like HiDPI support took the company half a decade.

5. NI stopped innovating years ago. Meanwhile, other companies take chances and win. Look at Arturia: the Brute series, Keystep series, Pigment - all these payed for them well. Everybody was making laugh of AKAI 10 years ago (Timbre Wolf!), but they took a grip of themselves, took a risk, concentrated on one thing and now they dominate the sampler workstation market.

6. NI overestimated their capabilites (and the market). They wanted to be sort of "Google", but in the music industry. NKS was about tying up the rest of the industry and make other developers dependent on NI - just as millions of websites nowadays are dependent on Google serving fonts for them. They were obviously pushing the "dominate then manipulate" strategy (which worked with Kontakt).

 

Its as simple as this:

During the pandemic, people jumped on producing music since it was something to do with all the spare time they had.

So they saw that as genuine business growth.

But.. it was only temporary, and two things happened:

They expanded thinking everything was going to only go up from here, but it was only temporary due to the pandemic.

Then, to make things even worse, AI music generators came out, so a lot less people decided to go down the difficult route of writing music that takes decades to master.

Why do that if you can throw out a song in seconds?

One other thing has only started to hit these software companies yet, and its a double punch blow from AI: the people making their own plugins and DAWs with AI development tools. On youtube i saw someone who vibe coded a vst effect and was selling it directly to happy customers.

 

The A.I. is totally a double-edged sword.
On one hand, if used as only a tool to speed up processes during creativity so a person can multi-taks better it has its uses.
On the other hand, if it replaces the person using the tool and is used by advertising agencies to replace hiring musicians, what they do not realise is it will eventually be able to do better advertising and completely replace them. or the promoters and producers on Netflix and the like using Suno and others, eventually, they too will be replaced because the A.I can choose and create faster to genre, theme, script and style and won;t need someone to make those calls because it will eventually do it in one pass, the music, selection and final product.

It has happened once this forgetfulness that it is supposed to be a tool and not a replacement, and it is an ongoing human cyclic mistake. A computer that people use to post here on this forum, was originally only designed as a tool. It eventually replaced with specific software, entire accounting and business departments only requiring a few people to operate it or the software to do so.

People should be careful what they wish for.

 

That's an interesting far right manifesto. It doesn't talk about native instrument though

 

Similar thing happened in late 90s. That decade was an era when millions and millions of people were adopting to the CD standard. So lots of people were buying CDs with music they already had, but on vinyl or cassettes. So record labels were selling not only current new titles, but also tons of re-released albums from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Large investing funds saw the profitability of the music industry and were buying big record companies one by one - not realizing that this is only a temporary surge in sales. When people completed their collections of older music, the sales could not be sustained at previous levels. But the investors wanted only revenue - ignoring the rise of Napster and the like. Instead of lowering the prices to compete with Internet and MP3, they decided to maintain a firm stance. To their doom.

 

Last edited: Jan 30, 2026 at 1:12 AM

The code is not open source so this is highly unlikely. Unless of course the good folks at NI decides to release the code before their doom which is also unlikely but not impossible

 

If them "doing the right thing" means giving away IP and authentication servers, I'd start stem bouncing soon.