Ok - I realise it's hard to be a one man band:)

So I may consider options to raise funding for my audio programming adventure.
That means presenting a document / proposal that contains the relevant market information to an investor or to a state agency and asking for what the hell my country doesn't attempt to take any share of it.
For that to work, the document needs to look interesting enough to someone who isn't interested in music or audio/dsp but about the amount of job opportunities it might create (if the supporter is the state) or about the money it might bring in return (if the supporter is an investor).

In short I need financial information about the VST plugin / software pro-audio market..

Anyone with cool or hard and boring data?

Thanks..

look for NAMM global report on google

Looks like I'm not priviledged enough to view it as it requires being a namm member (not just a registered namm website user)

Thanks anyway..

edit: some old reports seem to be available to anyone like http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/namm/2008musicusa/

Thanks for that link, Martin.

I've seen monthly reports for the MI market, and it is pretty clear to me that the sales reported are not an accurate reflection of what is going on in global and Web commerce. For example, plugin effect/instrument sales totaled $18 million in 2010. Compare that to the several hundred people employed by Native Instruments. There is NO WAY that those employees could be sustained by a proportion of that $18 million. Direct online sales from manufacturers probably dwarf the software sales in this report.

It was interesting to see the hardware sales, which are probably a more accurate reflection of the true situation. Floor mounted mulit-effect processors have sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year, which was surprising to me. My guess is that most of the Line 6 products would fall under this category, which would explain part of this figure (I wonder if IK Multimedia's various iDevices would fall under that category as well).

Sean Costello

NI sells lots of hardware too.

True.

One more option here could be http://www.kickstarter.com/. Throught I don't how it will work for a vst plugin for example. But one could try.

The requirement -in my opinion- is that there is a need for people with diverse skills. For example, assume that one has a plugin and handled the programming part successfully. There still is a need for:

- a musician who can demo the plugin
- a graphic artist who can make a nice gui (and preferably a nice website)
- someone who knows how to attract traffic to a website
- some funding for the above team for the time the plugin won't make any money.

There is also need for a musician who knows the current demands from such plugins (or else all we end up as an idea for a new plugin is an emulation of some vintage gear that we are not likely to afford to buy for studying). Of course one can always make yet another analog sounding synth or yet another guitar amp modeller, if anyone is still buying these.

BTW, I'm not sure but I think sylenth1 dev and diversion dev are 1 man bands.

As for diversion: he drew the GUI and website himself. But I'm not sure if he was the only one to do DSP code. And I think he setuped the site himself also.

For sylenth: there is also info somewhere that he drew the GUI himself. For DSP and the website - I have seen no info.

Yes I know there are successful "one man bands". Their property is likely to be to know what they want to do from the very start, not after wasting their energy on things that aren't likely to be a successful product in the end (or on anything that may fail to be successfully implemented), plus perhaps some luck, as one never can be sure about what's going to be a successful product.

I have wasted a lot of time on speech recognition and made a simple audio editor using what has remained after it has became clear that the project has failed because it became apparent that it takes a lot of data to build a successful speech recognition product and everything else is already available as open source (so in fact there was nothing to be developed anyway - but just the amount of data required was too much and reaching this conclusion took all the time I had).

Yeah I know there are many excuses for failure. But the next time (if that ever happens) I guess I'll only do what I already know that I can. That may mean the next time I will not be learning anything new, though