The times they are a changin' .....

 

You will own nothing and you will be happy eating bugs.

 

Buy from another brand:

Crucial X10 Portable 8TB - 829,99 €
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0F336NLC7...eb291888b02db585227d5412b&th=1&language=en_GB

 

Here is the trick: don't believe everything you're told—the tech-billionaire clique surrounding Mr. Schwab consists of only a handful of people. Simply stand your ground and say NO!!! And finally, stand up, fight back, and battle for your rights and freedom...!

 

It is not true. Magix owned Samplitude from 1998, Sequoia appeared in 2000, and both evolved enormously since then. Both were cutting-edge regarding their features (really were, it is not marketing at all). For many years Magix released software developed by their own. It wasn't until their final years that they let up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magix
https://web.archive.org/web/2010000...itude.com/us/presse/about_samplitude.520.html

 

can't wait the AI bubble pop, buying 4tb ssds for 200$ bucks again

 

Sadly, it will be at least 2-3 years before the prices go down...at least.

 

Holy fcking shit!! Is that serious??? I had to triple check the URL hahaha. God damn, I'm glad I decided to update my NAS at the beginning of the year. And to think, I was complaining I had to pay like $400 for a pair of 8TB WD RED spinners!!

 

It's far more pronounced in video editing circles - in my experience - for two reasons:

• 1) when you get hired straight out of school, you get hired based on your platform (Avid, DaVinci, or Adobe for the most part: due to Apple's stupidity, FCP is regrettably less and less part of the pro conversation) so you do "need to speak the same language as everyone else" indeed; and...

• 2) there are far fewer major players in professional video editing (Film, TV, Broadcast, Advertising) than there are in the Audio/DAW realm (there's so many now, I can't even list them all)

 

These are completely valid examples of products people install when collaborating, and even moreso if someone is mixing other peoples' projects. It is common for people to have multiple DAWs installed for exactly that reason. Sure, everything arriving in Protools would be ideal for some, but such customers are not who most people are getting work sent in from. Old versions will not open new versions' sessions, asking for stems is a dead giveaway, and it sucks to deal with all kinds of mistakes already baked in because some are not so easily fixed (overcompression, etc).

I'm not sure what this, or AI, have to do with NI. I do find it interesting that people who can write knowledgably will now need to dumb down what they write because when someone doesn't understand a topic they will claim something is "slop". Poor management and accounting driving a company into NI's situation are not comparing overlaps of TPS with Lean, JIT with Kanban, or Kaizen. vs CPI and 5S. Someone could have figured out the main problems at NI without ever leaving their desk.

 

Oh, I just brought that example up to show my point that we can't really stop using some software, not because we don't want to, but because of the culture around it, like Adobe for video editors or Waves plugins over producers.

About NI, well, the whole point I'm trying to make is that I see this happening with almost every company in the industry. It feels like they eventually can't keep growing without selling the very values that made them successful in the first place. And from what I saw, it's not like NI was giving everything away for cheap, yet things still ended up the way they did.

I'm not sure what caused the mass layoffs, so I can't say that was the reason. But I honestly wouldn't be surprised if AI-driven cost cutting was at least part of the conversation. We've seen so many companies saying things like "we can reduce costs by replacing people with AI" that it almost feels like an industry standard now. Especially after reading that "...the entire customer support team was terminated." Uber did something very similar by replacing a large part of its customer support with AI and automation.

 

You don't think the professional music industry is enough to keep them afloat?

 

Well, it keeps being framed as caused by capitalism, VC, and any other number of things. They can all be true, to some degree. But if a new owner of a company looks at the financials and sees the current roster of employees are still there after the company was driven into a half-billion dollar hole in the ground; it's a safe guess one of the first things they will do would be to stop the digging. Anyone hiding a shovel in their office closet are going to be the first ones gone, and most others would be trying to hide their own shovels under their desks.

Will AI replace some programmers, sure that is happening everywhere. Less expensive human ones will be brought in too. We're talking about programmers whose idea of scalable interfaces was to push LUA scripting onto 3rd party content developers, and whose idea of MacOS compatibility for their other flagship product, their keyboards line, could not load native Apple format plugins for multiple years and multiple versions. No matter what ecosystem they thought they had people locked into, it's pretty obvious that kind of thinking backfired. As has thinking "nobody can code this stuff but us".

 

what's next? you gonna say that we caused them a lost revenue of each pirated software we downloaded? lets be real, more than half of the people that go to piracy was not going to buy the product anyway

I've used cracked fl studio for 6 years, then when I finally had enough money to buy it I did, without thinking twice, but if wasn't for piracy, I would never had made the money to buy it...

What I'm tryin to show is that you're trying to blame something on the byproduct of its own failure.

 

About that, I still think capitalism is ultimately the reason behind layoffs like these. I see the economic system as the root of the criteria used to decide what's considered a good or a bad financial decision.

A state-owned company doesn't necessarily have to be profitable. Even if it's heavily in debt, if the service it provides is valuable enough to society, it can continue to exist, financed through other means. That's how it naturally should work...

A privately owned company doesn't really play by those rules. At the end of the day, it has to be profitable. Having valuable products is good, but optional. Having respectable policies is good, but optional. Treating employees well is good, but also optional. Profitability isn't.

You probably see where I'm going with this.

When a company acquires another company that was already in debt, whose main value comes from creative work done by people, and one of its first major decisions is to lay off a large part of that workforce while the industry is increasingly pushing AI and automation as cost-cutting tools, it tells me that preserving the company's creative role is no longer the priority. The focus shifts to improving the numbers on paper, even if it's clearly against the own company logic.

And it's not that I think companies shouldn't care about money. Of course they should. My issue is when financial performance stops being a priority and becomes *the priority*, to the point where they're willing to weaken the very creative process that gives the company its value in the first place.

And that's where I say the root of the problem is capitalism. This is only possible, and often even encouraged, because the economic system rewards exactly that kind of behavior. It can reward other behaviors too, and that's probably one of the reasons we know NI in the first place. But when those values come into conflict with maximizing financial returns, profitability always wins.

Money should matter, but not more than the value a company creates for people. To me, that's ultimately more valuable than money itself. But that's probably a much broader philosophical discussion. I think the difference between our opinions lies at that deeper level.


About the company behavior: yeah for sure, actually I don't think native instruments was really doing an amazing job even at the creative level at all, their layout is so old and the way kontakt work has been the same for like, ever? it's crazy that they didn't profitted doing so bad at that and charging the prices they did, wild.

 

Currently, depending on where you look in your home country and online, Disks are at least 50% more expensive than they were a year ago, and worse, some are closer to nearly double the price (e.g. some Samsung's).
People will have to do regular maintenance and wait it out until prices go back down (hopefully) but hardware does eventually die, so sometimes there isn't a lot of choice.

 

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" (demographic of people). 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.

 

my biggest fear:

 

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 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