Technology investor Francisco Partners has acquired majority ownership of Native Instruments with plans to create an “end-to-end user centric platform for the music creation industry”. As part of the deal, investor EMH Partners and Native Instruments’ founders become minority shareholders. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021.


Native Instruments setting up for the future


While the news may sound troubling to some, the Berlin-based manufacturer seems to be in a good place at the moment. Following EMH Partners’ major investments in 2017 and 2020, Native Instruments experienced significant growth in its revenues, partnerships, and monthly active users. The recent past saw co-founder and former CEO Daniel Haver step down to make room for new blood and the long-awaited release of the standalone Maschine+. It must have been the right time to put the company in the hands of a global investment firm that’s able to back its future with business know-how and major capital.


The changes in leadership have already produced some ambitious goals. The company wants to consolidate its products and industry influence into a singular platform for seamless music making experience. NI already indicated that it’s going in this direction with the launch of Native Access and the Sounds.com audio library. The probable next step is tying together Maschine, Komplete, and Traktor into a cohesive ecosystem of services, software and hardware. There’s lots of potential in this endeavour, so it will be interesting to watch the company pull it off over time. If Francisco Partners has its head and heart in the right place and NI employees get to have their say, the manufacturer could become a dominant force in music technology and the broader music industry. Here’s to what will hopefully turn out to be a strong start to a new era for Native Instruments.


More information

https://www.gearnews.com/native-ins...tor-plans-end-to-end-music-creation-platform/

 

This is going to be an interesting year for a lot of music tech companies, particularly for NI with this acquisition. I read up a bit about Francisco Partners, it looks to be a very technology focused investment firm and they have billions in capital. A part of me wants to believe that this is a step in the right direction with hopes that this will allow NI not only to focus on improving existing products but also creating forward thinking music tech.

 

I wonder if people will remain so positive if they decide to go with a subscription-only model..?

 

Adobe did and no problem with that

 

Welp.. Absynth's daddy made his new baby Rhizomatic, the only NI product left I own has now been replaced by its original developer who will actually keep working on it and won't leave it rotting for 10 years heh. Bye bye NI!

 

Yeah I can see it coming, this will most likely either be a subscription model, or they will lock some of their fundamental products behind some proprietary platforms which will have a few benefits and a metric fuck ton of disadvantages for their customers.
Here's hoping that reverse engineers will come to our rescue, because some of NI's products, especially Kontakt, are really essential for a lot of genres. I couldn't even imagine where I would begin if I had to stop using Kontakt or if the use of it would go hand in hand with any palpable amount of uncertainty.

 

bought it. really interesting beast.

 

I can see it now: one vaccination one free month subscription. No maximums.

 

That's that then.

 

Allow me to explain as a global tech economy guru:

Fuck music. Bless money.

Fuck users. Bless money.

Fuck Native Instruments. Bless money.

Bless money. Fuck everything else.

But look at the bright side. With that shitload of money they might even develop a Kontakt vst3 version. Man, I'm hyped...

 

I actually was sad when Adobe bought Macromedia, all those top end applications would turn to utter crap...
I was correct. Everything that Adobe has taken over turned to garbage not only that but many applications that were critical to the internet success for graphics and webpage development were killed off.

I remember when the pro's were jumping like fools when Apple took over Nothing Real Shake, dimwits did not listen to what I told many people that Apple only bought it to force people unto the Mac platform and would kill it if the sales of Mac's dropped off and of course they killed it even on the Mac version after they killed the Windows and Linux versions. They also did the same with Emagic Logic Platinum and also Macromedia Edit with was the precursor to Final Cut.

Magix took over Sony Vegas but it was not to make Vegas better, it was to tie it in with their video and Audio Daw products.

The same thing also happened to Pinnacle Studio Liquid Edition. I still have the old v5.5 which even today looks impressive compared to the video editors of today. After Avid took over Pinnacle for a bit they turned Liquid edition into a complete joke.

Wait and see if this is good or bad...

 

I agree with the core of your opinion. But with Macromedia it wasn't so bad. Mainly because Flash/Director/Dreamweaver didn't have competence. Illustrator may had some, don't remember, anyways was the best vector graphics editor hands down. It's still true that they progressively got worse.
There's still nothing comparable with Flash nowadays even with the most fancy-ass Javascript/CSS/SVG all put together. And not even counting the editor, only the runtime plugin. The development of the SVG format is one of the most absurd ones I've seen. Plain text over-engineered XML for a vector image format, WTF...

But yeah, big companies predate small and medium in general. Microsoft has a long record sheet, Autodesk with anything that smells 3D. Facebook with social media and especially messaging apps. NVidia with high-end ovens... etcetera

 

Last edited: Jan 21, 2021

@danfuerth
Interesting that you would bring up Vegas. I stopped updating my license a while ago. How are the latest versions that require Windows 10 to run? The one that I bought (v15 I think) still had a lot of crashes, although it was good to see it updated at all.

I am personally pretty worried about this NI thing, especially looking at it from the angle of what happened with Adobe. They went from high end products that I would have loved to learn to a company that I avoid as far as I possibly can.

 

I don't really care who acquires who or what, I just want to know If NI is coming up with amazing VSts why the hell can't they update that Kontakt GUI?! it sure is something designed by a pure Sadist...

 

As long as cracked Kontakt works, that is what matters

 

I like NI but they really gave up.on that standalone version of Massive X, now did they? :D

We'll see what the future holds. The only language corporations know is money, so they better do a good job or they won't get some.

 

Since they do so, I'm using their software cracked. Before that decision I was using a legal copy of Ps CS5 and I would've upgraded
for the price of about $700 or $800 they asked for but then the subscriptions came and I'm really no fan of that. I want to work offline
and I want my software licenses to be mine. Subscription means you pay forever, even if you paid off the full pice years ago already.
In case of Photoshop the price pays off after 3 years of subscription - any subscription month extra means, you're paying more than
the product is worth it. It's like you're buying a house but still have to pay rent after it's paid off.

Rhizomatic is the company's name. The VST is named Plasmonic, was wondering why I couldn't find anything by looking for Rhizomatic.
Does anyone know how to resize that VST? Tried the Demo but the window is so small and the letters are blurry, I can't see anything.

 

I hope new owners wont change the drm to dong for you pc/macintosh