inMusic has apparently laid off 100 Native Instruments employees from nearly all departments

Kuuhaku · Jul 23, 2026 at 3:44 AM

Balisani said: ↑

Respectfully, you make a lot of individual valid points, but they don't hold the fabric of reality together (much).

It helps to zoom out: before software piracy, the RIAA was screaming bloody murder (all the way to SCOTUS) about cassette piracy. I've never known a professional musician to buy actual records - our entire vinyl collection was either our parents, or gifts or promo copies, and our tape collection (reel-to-reel for the generation before mine, and cassette) were usually passed on, or copied from fellow musicians. The RIAA even tried to impose a piracy tax on blank cassettes - crying about lost revenue.

As it turned out, they made a killing with vinyl, mass murder with CDs, and - at the height of Napster, seeding, sharing, etc. - genocidal grade record profits (at a time when anyone could copy CDs bit for bit, or download anything digital) before streaming platforms took the wind out of their sails, and upended the music industry near entirely.

Zooming back in a little, I remember when one could buy MS Office for $1 in Bangkok, the entire Adobe suite of crap for $5, etc., heck, even my own company's latest version (complete with Installation, Admin, and User manuals) was available too, also for $5 - and yes, I bought it, and brought it back to show our Devs, CEO and COO: we all got a good chuckle out of it.

My point being: last I checked, Adobe, Avid, Microsoft, etc., are still standing, if not all doing great, and it wasn't "piracy" that snuffed out the record industry, but the very "legal" streaming platforms (and their leeching minions, the social media giants). For a couple of decades, I got quarterly checks in the mail - not a lot, but always welcome addition - but not one since streaming became the dominant source of music delivery to the masses. And pardon me for repeating myself, but streaming is legal.

Anyway - it's a complex, and violently fluid flux, so to speak: streaming, like any self-respecting whale or mammoth has its own leech, or predator even: ai generated music platforms, so imma sit back, relax, listen to the 8-track and count the blows..., but please, the argument that piracy has caused any software company lasting and lethal harm, is weak - if not null and void.

What piracy has in fact done is stimulate (electrify) the audio software market - I know of at least one company owner who repeatedly leaked his own cracked software to generate buzz and awareness - and cause great harm to outboard hardware companies (Tree Audio comes to mind) that have faced a shrinking of the market (across the board: from A to D list studios).

It's much cheaper to download the latest Waves collection from the sister site and work entirely ITB than to spend $800 or $2,000 on outboard gear. But even then, such piracy has stimulated the market in ways unforeseen: established companies (Eventide, TC, UA) are recycling their flagship algorithms into small form outboard gear known as 500-series and pedals, and smaller companies (Strymon, Electro-Harmonix, Empress, Source Audio) have been innovating and presenting great sounding gear in small, affordable form.

In the last 12+ years, I know of several new plugin companies that launched, and have grown (in portfolio, user base, and quality). Boz Digital Audio is one of them (I figure I was among the first 100 customers, and own about a dozen or more of Boz's plugins now), even though his products have recently popped up on the sister site as well. Likewise Sonible (founded the same year as Boz Digital), oeksound (2016), and of course Pulsar Modular (2019), among others.

Zooming out again, and looking at defunct or insolvent brick and mortar companies, it helps to factor in debt - over piracy. The real pirates, one might say, are the bankers. Banks loan money based on yearly turnover, pipeline, business plans, promises of growth and high returns. When those fail to materialize, let's all blame the outsiders, the pirates, the immigrants, the aliens - but never, ever, look in the mirror and admit: we (the captain of the ship) effed up, we took on too much debt, we didn't have a clear picture, or worse, we were just incompetent (at managing a bigger ship in high waters).

I understand that the RIAA was looking to shift whatever blame (if any) to cassettes, and then mp3 'piracy' (presumable ai will be their next target - but they've been fairly quiet of late, haven't they). I understand that Presidents and CEOs and CFOs are looking to blame outside forces (sister sites and such, unfair competition from China, etc), but the fact is and remains that wherever there's screw up - and no matter the socioeconomic strata - the first and predominant factor is always incompetence. Always. The second is corruption (whether moral, legal, financial, or all of the above). We've seen this in other industries at a far greater scale (Enron comes to mind), and in our industry as well (payola, and whatever it's called now).

And where incompetence and corruption meet, they poop out "the other" (the immigrant, the Mexican, the Arab, Muslim, Jew, black, or Asian 'other'). In our industry, in our context, when a company fails: "piracy;" when a company lays off an entire department: "private equity." It's the same reflex: deflecting, blame shifting, scapegoating.

As it were, we don't really have all the facts (financial data especially), but we do know that NI essentially ran out of innovation road - their product lines stagnated (mostly). That in itself, is not a bad thing: look at Steinway, it's not as if they've innovated much, if at all, in the last 100+ years, have they. Likewise for most horn and string instrument manufacturer. What to do? The key here is they thought they could keep growing and growing endlessly. Steinway knew and knows better: don't start expanding, hiring, and flooding the market. Granted, it's different for software, different manufacturing process, different price bracket. But it helps to zoom out and look beyong our narrow context to get a greater perspective on the world.
Click to expand...

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.

sexyeyez02 · Jul 23, 2026 at 4:51 AM

Balisani said: ↑

Respectfully, you make a lot of individual valid points, but they don't hold the fabric of reality together (much).

It helps to zoom out: before software piracy, the RIAA was screaming bloody murder (all the way to SCOTUS) about cassette piracy. I've never known a professional musician to buy actual records - our entire vinyl collection was either our parents, or gifts or promo copies, and our tape collection (reel-to-reel for the generation before mine, and cassette) were usually passed on, or copied from fellow musicians. The RIAA even tried to impose a piracy tax on blank cassettes - crying about lost revenue.

As it turned out, they made a killing with vinyl, mass murder with CDs, and - at the height of Napster, seeding, sharing, etc. - genocidal grade record profits (at a time when anyone could copy CDs bit for bit, or download anything digital) before streaming platforms took the wind out of their sails, and upended the music industry near entirely.

Zooming back in a little, I remember when one could buy MS Office for $1 in Bangkok, the entire Adobe suite of crap for $5, etc., heck, even my own company's latest version (complete with Installation, Admin, and User manuals) was available too, also for $5 - and yes, I bought it, and brought it back to show our Devs, CEO and COO: we all got a good chuckle out of it.

My point being: last I checked, Adobe, Avid, Microsoft, etc., are still standing, if not all doing great, and it wasn't "piracy" that snuffed out the record industry, but the very "legal" streaming platforms (and their leeching minions, the social media giants). For a couple of decades, I got quarterly checks in the mail - not a lot, but always welcome addition - but not one since streaming became the dominant source of music delivery to the masses. And pardon me for repeating myself, but streaming is legal.

Anyway - it's a complex, and violently fluid flux, so to speak: streaming, like any self-respecting whale or mammoth has its own leech, or predator even: ai generated music platforms, so imma sit back, relax, listen to the 8-track and count the blows..., but please, the argument that piracy has caused any software company lasting and lethal harm, is weak - if not null and void.

What piracy has in fact done is stimulate (electrify) the audio software market - I know of at least one company owner who repeatedly leaked his own cracked software to generate buzz and awareness - and cause great harm to outboard hardware companies (Tree Audio comes to mind) that have faced a shrinking of the market (across the board: from A to D list studios).

It's much cheaper to download the latest Waves collection from the sister site and work entirely ITB than to spend $800 or $2,000 on outboard gear. But even then, such piracy has stimulated the market in ways unforeseen: established companies (Eventide, TC, UA) are recycling their flagship algorithms into small form outboard gear known as 500-series and pedals, and smaller companies (Strymon, Electro-Harmonix, Empress, Source Audio) have been innovating and presenting great sounding gear in small, affordable form.

In the last 12+ years, I know of several new plugin companies that launched, and have grown (in portfolio, user base, and quality). Boz Digital Audio is one of them (I figure I was among the first 100 customers, and own about a dozen or more of Boz's plugins now), even though his products have recently popped up on the sister site as well. Likewise Sonible (founded the same year as Boz Digital), oeksound (2016), and of course Pulsar Modular (2019), among others.

Zooming out again, and looking at defunct or insolvent brick and mortar companies, it helps to factor in debt - over piracy. The real pirates, one might say, are the bankers. Banks loan money based on yearly turnover, pipeline, business plans, promises of growth and high returns. When those fail to materialize, let's all blame the outsiders, the pirates, the immigrants, the aliens - but never, ever, look in the mirror and admit: we (the captain of the ship) effed up, we took on too much debt, we didn't have a clear picture, or worse, we were just incompetent (at managing a bigger ship in high waters).

I understand that the RIAA was looking to shift whatever blame (if any) to cassettes, and then mp3 'piracy' (presumable ai will be their next target - but they've been fairly quiet of late, haven't they). I understand that Presidents and CEOs and CFOs are looking to blame outside forces (sister sites and such, unfair competition from China, etc), but the fact is and remains that wherever there's screw up - and no matter the socioeconomic strata - the first and predominant factor is always incompetence. Always. The second is corruption (whether moral, legal, financial, or all of the above). We've seen this in other industries at a far greater scale (Enron comes to mind), and in our industry as well (payola, and whatever it's called now).

And where incompetence and corruption meet, they poop out "the other" (the immigrant, the Mexican, the Arab, Muslim, Jew, black, or Asian 'other'). In our industry, in our context, when a company fails: "piracy;" when a company lays off an entire department: "private equity." It's the same reflex: deflecting, blame shifting, scapegoating.

As it were, we don't really have all the facts (financial data especially), but we do know that NI essentially ran out of innovation road - their product lines stagnated (mostly). That in itself, is not a bad thing: look at Steinway, it's not as if they've innovated much, if at all, in the last 100+ years, have they. Likewise for most horn and string instrument manufacturer. What to do? The key here is they thought they could keep growing and growing endlessly. Steinway knew and knows better: don't start expanding, hiring, and flooding the market. Granted, it's different for software, different manufacturing process, different price bracket. But it helps to zoom out and look beyong our narrow context to get a greater perspective on the world.
Click to expand...

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.

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inMusic has apparently laid off 100 Native Instruments employees from nearly all departments

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inMusic has apparently laid off 100 Native Instruments employees from nearly all departments

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