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.

 

Better be ready than sorry.

 

Entrepreneurial mistake: Instead of going to the bank and presenting a concept for how to restructure or downsize their company and applying for a loan, in 2021 they went to the American Francisco Partners, which then completely ruined and plundered them.

Locust investors
Buy, plunder, discard

Invest little, rake in the cash – this strategy apparently no longer works when the economy and consumer spending collapse. According to Standard & Poor's, companies acquired by financial investors are, on average, taking on debt 6.6 times their annual profit. With declining revenues, companies like Native Instruments, which have to repay such high loans, are just as sure to be driven to the brink of ruin.

Buy it, strip it, flip it

Higher stakes – lower returns: Financial investors are not at all happy with this trend. They strive for the "super return," a return on capital of 25 percent or more. Their motto has long been: "Buy it, strip it, flip it" – buy it, plunder it, get rid of it. After four or five years, according to the rule of the game, the investors sell their holdings again.

 

Nooo... I just had late breakfast... why!!

I just listened 10 seconds in which he talked about tomatoes cans inflation. My indigestion got even worse... I'll come back after vomiting my late breakfast

 

The “code” won't stop people; after all, “code” doesn't stop people from releasing VST plugins for free, even though they are protected by Ilook. A good example is the “ATI Omega Driver,” which the community released because they were dissatisfied with the original driver performance and the manufacturer ATI was very slow to release new drivers and improvements. As already mentioned, if the community wants something, they will simply make it happen.

 

If Native Instruments is permanently gone, I think the UVI Falcon will benefit and gain new customers. Perhaps Roland, Korg, or Yamaha will buy Native Instruments and give it a new name: Roland Kontakt v9, Yamaha Kontakt v9, or Korg Kontakt v9!

 

The biggest problem with vibe coding I see is when there is a problem with the code, and the coder doesn't understand the code base because AI wrote a big chunk of it. Trying to maintain it is becoming a challenge.

AI written code is great (when it works) for temporary projects

 

What can we expect now? I'll tell you - this:

 

Last edited: Jan 30, 2026 at 2:08 PM

I have been down that road just for fun and only related to a very basic Bitwig item. And given that I have no experience in coding the overall process and output was the least satifying. Chatgpt and others are in a world of their own, spinning around ideas and executions that very often result in - well nothing. But it has to be said again - I am not coder. Hence, I am pretty sure that a knowledged coder can turn around something nice with those tools.

 

Excuse the nitpicking, but that already started in the mid to late 80's when cd sales exploded. Record companies ain't stupid and realized the goldmine they had immediately.

As far as AI, like all the damage to society and peoples brains smart phones and social media has caused, people will happily flock to this new rope with which to hang themselves.

You could look at AI as an alien aggressive species that has invaded earth, promising all sorts of miracles for the human race at first. This gets everyone to embrace them as saviors. Then the noose tightens and FAFO happens. Oops, to late, lol.

In some sci-fi invasion films, there's always the slimy weasel traitors who sell out to the aliens in exchange for wealth and power. In the case of AL, these are the tech billionaires who invited it here so to speak.

 

Last edited: Jan 30, 2026 at 3:19 PM

Behringer Battery 5

 

I pray NI doesn’t turn into something like ‘Splice AI,’ because if that happens, the next update will just be a Make Hit button/sample pack that spits out nothing but elevator musak! (no prejudice, about musak okay? I’m referring here to the whole ready‑made and pasteurized vibe).
ps: Did you know there are digital influencers —argh!!!— claiming that it went bankrupt precisely because it didn’t ‘niche down’? I wouldn’t be surprised if this actually happens...

 

Last edited: Jan 30, 2026 at 4:22 PM

These influencers never worked at NI, they're not insiders, and they don't know the sales
figures, yet they think they know exactly how the markets work and why NI failed.

Only the insolvency administrator and his team can analyze this accurately right now.
He has access to the bank statements, sales figures, debts, and so on!

 

I'm afraid that's inevitable,
I've been testing various virtual instruments, controllers and AI audio tools, and there's no other way around it,
NI is stuck with Kontakt+MIDI, no fancy MPE controllers, iZotope is falling behind UVR+dxrevive etc...

NI having 300M debt isn't something you can bail out unless you proclaim yourself AI company that needs government help to sustain society/culture values