so good to read that from other people, I remember how hard was to show-up to people that piracy isn't a disease, piracy is the symptom... anyway, nice points, clear as daylight.

 

I participate in sister site activities. Im not saying its just piracy. Just wanted to put some light on it in this forum.

Also microsoft, adobe etc. Have a wayyyy bigger market share than the music market.

Waves Audio has roughly 600,000 to 850,000 active, paying customers globally. In a world with 8 billion people, a customer base of less than 1 million people keeping a massive tech company afloat proves exactly how small and fragile the professional audio software market truly is.

 

I appreciate your "light" and perspective, I do, but "600,000 to 850,000 active paying customers" is ginormous compared to pre-internet or even pre pre-computer days.

For instance, the Yamaha DX-7 (160,000 units) and Korg M1 (250,000 units) were runaway hits, and the best selling synthesizers of all time, with a one-time purchase. Granted, Waves' wares are cheaper (now, certainly not then), but they keep extorting - sorry selling and selling, drip drip drip in their cash register.

You do well to mention "a world with 8 billion people," most of whom are tethered to their mobile device, and how our pro audio market is small and fragile. That said, to go back to my Steinway pianos analogy, not only are they still churning out pianos to this day, but they have very healthy competition, not least in Italy, where Paolo Fazioli figured: "I can do better," and did. While Fazioli's factory produces fewer pianos yearly than Steinway (which in turn is dwarfed by Japanese piano makers, Yamaha and Kawai in the lead) and so on and so forth (I've even played on Indonesian made pianos in Bali - better than Young Chang pianos for instance).

Spoiler

My two-fold point being:

• 1) our music industry world (hardware and software) is actually wider based and more robust than it appears at first sight (making digital pianos and drums for nearly every price point has helped). Last I checked, the official US data pegs US based individuals who file their income tax as "musician" at 106,000 (2024 figures). About 20 years ago or less, I remember it being 160,000+, not an insignificant decline, but many of those 160k 'professional' musicians were boomers, and are now plain and simple retired or dead.
  
  And that's just those who file as musicians, not part timers, weekend warriors, seasonal cats, hobbyists, or 'nostalgists.' And that's just us Americans (we are 4.2% to 4.4% of the global population): so we can extrapolate that there are millions more musicians worldwide (with various degrees of material and critical success), 10 million of whom label themselves and release music as "artists" on streaming media, although Spotify claims "11+M with an estimated 200,000 being professional artists and only 165,000 of them with a monthly listener count of 10,000 or higher."
  
  
• 2) there is always room for new players - pun intended - and improvement, as Paolo Fazioli has proven, but also Yamaha, Kawai, Roland, Korg, Casio, and of course our software darlings, Spectrasonics, Native Instruments, Arturia, Cherry Audio, and so on.

Having worked at a software company in various capacities (PM among them), and co-designed amongst other products, an award winning digital audio editor deployed on 17,000+ sites worldwide, I have had some experience from the other side of the fence. Neither Waves Audio Ltd (534 employees) or Native Instruments Gmbh (509 before layoffs) qualify as "a massive tech company." I suppose it's all about scale as you imply, but a well managed and steered company of 500+ employees with a yearly turnover of €77M should be doing rather well with an existing customer base of "less than 1 million." Nothing fragile about that.

Let's also factor in how lucky those companies are to have benefited (instead of suffered) from the covid pandemic, and how stupid they all were (Fender, I'm looking at you) to think it was going to last. Nothing fragile about that once in a lifetime windfall.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jul 24, 2026 at 2:14 PM

I’m not saying piracy caused Native Instruments to fail, or that a small market cannot be healthy. I’m saying a $30-100 digital product and a $6,000 synth or $100,000 piano do not operate under the same economics.

Music software is supported by a relatively small group of paying users, while a much larger group expects constant updates, support, and compatibility for decades. When free access becomes normalized, the paying group carries more of that cost.

Bad management, private equity, overhiring, and debt can all be part of the problem. I’m only asking us to consider that our own behavior may be part of it too. The one perspective that I didnt see on this tread.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jul 24, 2026 at 2:14 PM

There are only two possibilities: if you don't like a company, you don't buy its products.
If the company manufactures something useful or something that offers added value, you buy its product.

 

Private equity is the problem, no matter which industry we are talking about, I would encourage you to read about it.

 

Yeah totally agree, people point the debt as the problem, but they rarely ask why that debt surges or what external pressures force a company into the red. As I mentioned earlier, companies face relentless pressure from investors, specifically Private Equity to constantly increase their margins

As we've already discussed in this thread, capitalism demands endless production. Being a valuable/sustainable isn't enough. Even if you own an industry standard like Kontakt and have steady revenue from subscriptions and library fees, you still can't survive unless you are constantly flooding the market with new products. The market doesn't reward a stable, good company; it only rewards growth. But nothing can grow forever, everything in this world is finite, including creativity.

When a company reaches its natural limit and can't grow anymore, it gets pushed into debt, even if millions of users love and rely on it. It’s completely unnatural.

Think about it on a human level: we don't expect a person to infinitely scale their output over their entire life. If someone is a great cook for 20 years, that’s enough. They have loyal customers who love their food, and they don't need to "grow" their cooking exponentially every year. But that logic doesn't apply to capitalism. Private equity doesn't care about creating actual value; they only care about extracting profit, regardless of how it affects the company or the consumers.

 

Perhaps the economics of the middle class and lower class professional musicians have something to do with all this. They have basically gone extinct. When Kontakt first came out and Komplete 2 or 3 there was a functioning music industry full of artists, producers, engineers and composers all able to pursue music as a living. As the industry shifted to streaming and the financial realities of touring became impossible the number of "professional" musicians shrank drastically. I blame the streaming monopoly 100%. They are taking all the money that used to be distributed around the music making enterprise. People stopped buying records and that hollowed out the industry. So, no money to buy tools for a job very few have now.

 

Back then, the job of NI’s executive board was certainly to analyze trends and markets, and to decide which products to keep, which new ones to create, and whom to hire or let go.

It’s a complex situation; if mistakes are made or things are ignored, the company goes bankrupt, and usually, an insolvency administrator steps in to see what can be salvaged. There is also a dark side to the market economy: people who strip companies of their assets.

 

@Somnambulist

In my country, regular HDDs have become 280% more expensive than last year. Luckily, I managed to buy a few HDDs before the end of 2025, where the f**k do I live

 

It seems it's completely unknown to many here that this debt taken by companies recently acquired by private equity is not about growth, not because of streaming services, it isn't about piracy, not about a company not analysing trends properly 15 years ago:


https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43253-025-00159-z

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...k-debt-market-to-pay-themselves-credit-weekly

https://www.moonfare.com/de/glossary/dividend-recapitalization

 

Today, the price of a barrel of oil rose to $100; you will all see and pay the consequences in the near future.

 

Thanks for the links, @Leivo!

Typical companies go to their principal bank to take out a loan. If that bank stops lending to you, you know you are
completely broke—and with a "locust" investor, you might manage to survive for another three, four, or five years.

 

It is sadly more important now than ever to constantly maintain what we have in the hope prices go down in the coming years (and not too many years).