KVR Audio

esl · Post by **esl** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 8:34 pm

it seems that there are many excellent synths from large and small developers but most of them start around $150 and go up from there.

what exactly detirmines the price point? there are no parts & manufacturing costs since it's a virtual instrument, and there are no distributors taking a cut (and jacking up the price).

I am ignorant to the time and expertise it takes to code a new intstrument. but, if I understand correctly, when a consumer buys a synth they are paying for:

-the time and expertise it takes to code the instrument
-the design of the GUI
-advertising costs

is there anything else that I am missing?

if indeed the main costs to developers are the coding and the GUI, then shouldn't new soft synths all cost around $40?

I am not trying to offend anybody, I am just curious, please help me understand.

torhan · Post by **torhan** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 8:39 pm

Supply and demand?

I know there are several threads covering this. I think it comes down to the fact that if a small developer sells like 50 (?) copies (or whatever the #), it's nowhere near the amount of Tritons Korg can sell....in order to recoup the costs.

Hunter · Post by **Hunter** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 8:42 pm

A good GUI costs a lot of money. Programmers need to spend serious time coding plugins, the more complex, the more time. Then there is marketing, beta testing, patch making, support, etc,etc which will all take the time of someone, which will usually cost money unless people are being very generous.

Plus developers need to pay their bills and earn an income as much as anyone else. You have to be mad to program vsts for a living, given the talent of the programmers, they would most likely be earning many times more $$$ working in the cushioned arms of a bigger software developer.

From my experience though, you wouldn't believe the amount of work that goes into plugins, for the paltry sum charged for them.

Hunter · Post by **Hunter** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 8:44 pm

oh and then you have things like NAMM and Musikmesse to promote yourself at, and then you really are talking big, big expenses.

mandolarian · Post by **mandolarian** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 8:47 pm

Oh, come on, Hunter, every hardware designer knows that software programming is just 'typing'

Improv · Post by **Improv** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 8:48 pm

Hunter wrote:A good GUI costs a lot of money. Programmers need to spend serious time coding plugins, the more complex, the more time. Then there is marketing, beta testing, patch making, support, etc,etc which will all take the time of someone, which will usually cost money unless people are being very generous.

Plus developers need to pay their bills and earn an income as much as anyone else. You have to be mad to program vsts for a living, given the talent of the programmers, they would most likely be earning many times more $$$ working in the cushioned arms of a bigger software developer.

From my experience though, you wouldn't believe the amount of work that goes into plugins, for the paltry sum charged for them.

Not only what you said, Jim, but commercial software developers regularly charge $50 per hour and up for their skills as compensation for their time and knowledge. Multiply that by several hundred hours of development time and you can begin to see where the costs come from.

The devs have every justification for charging what they do regardless of quantities sold. Of course some seem to feel that a dev should work for minimum wage.

Meffy · Post by **Meffy** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 8:48 pm

I think the cost isn't entirely based on what's happened before the purchase. Got to keep the developers alive and housed so they can write the next generation of software. :-)

As torhan says, many software instruments don't sell in volumes nearly as large as they deserve to. Without the economies of scale that come with massive sales, prices have to stay fairly high in order to keep the makers a going concern.

Hey, I'm willing to make the sacrifice when I can afford to (I'm kinda poor). The most expensive music software I've ever bought still cost a fraction of the price of the cheapest hardware synth I own. Looks like a bargain from my perspective.

On top of all that, users can choose from a really impressive variety of low-cost and free software, donationware, charityware, and so forth.

jkotz · Post by **jkotz** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 8:48 pm

Honestly, a good economic model/system has yet to develop to deal with the ideas of "intelectual property" and software development, so instead the old standby of product-manufacturing has been used and Devs are left charging whatever the market will bear.
Sure, part of what you're paying for when you buy a VirusTI is the hardware. But how much is that worth if there's no software to run on it (i.e. no sounds being made)?
In the end the software you own is worth what you're willing to pay for it.

Improv · Post by **Improv** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 8:50 pm

mandolarian wrote:Oh, come on, Hunter, every hardware designer knows that software programming is just 'typing'

I wonder how many program their own software because they think that software dev is so damn easy?

About 1 in 500?

VitaminD · Post by **VitaminD** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 8:54 pm

plus the math involved and the general ability to solve problems of the DSP variety... its not as if one without any of these experiences/knowledge says "ok I think ill whip up Z3ta+ today in my spare time.." - even seasoned programmers may have a problem with this type of work since its so specific and specialized..

at least thats how I FEEL about it..

wait for Rene' or URS to chime in..

jmh · Post by **jmh** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 8:55 pm

Rather than address the question directly, I'll be my usual self and probably will get persecuted for it... but here goes.

Instead of asking "why do software instruments cost so much from my perspective", the question "why should everything be cheap simply because folks want it cheap" should be aired more often.

It's kind of sad to see how the 'market' is slowly degrading into this - constant groupbuy begging, complaints about prices, requests for explanations to pricing, so forth and so on.

Apologies to the original poster if this feels blunt - as I said I'm not directing this at you. Rather, I'm commenting on this issue since it keeps popping up more and more nowadays, I guess I've read about what I wrote above in several threads today.

No doubt the usual pricefighter participants will join this discussion now, be warned

FWIW Meffy made a good point - there's a lot to choose from, in every price range. I wish the pricefighting crusaders didn't forget that every time a groupbuy request pops up...

JMH

kovacs · Post by **kovacs** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 9:00 pm

"No distributors" is not true - many soft synths are sold as retail products. Native Instruments is an example.

But there are very good examples of decently priced, downloadable synths like Wusikstation, DiscoDSP Fantom etc.

kodama · Post by **kodama** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 9:14 pm

Some stuff is over priced, some is under priced, and lots of it is just not for me!

Overall, I am floored by how much sweet freeware there is though!

Muff Wiggler · Post by **Muff Wiggler** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 9:19 pm

i'm starting to buy hardware again after a couple years in a VST frenzy. For one I've got all the VST i could realistically need, and for two the average VST price is getting to the point where I could buy a nice piece of hardware instead. VST is *amazing* stuff, and there's a lot of freedom and flexibility that comes from it. It's a very enabling technology. But when it's the same price as an analog filter or component for my modular, the hardware is gonna win most of the time - and now that I have all the basics covered in VST, the hardware is gonna win almost all of the time.

emdot_ambient · Post by **emdot_ambient** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 9:21 pm

esl wrote:it seems that there are many excellent synths from large and small developers but most of them start around $150 and go up from there...if indeed the main costs to developers are the coding and the GUI, then shouldn't new soft synths all cost around $40?

Frankly, knowing the cost/performance of the old analog synthsizers I'm surprised today's music technology doesn't cost more.

On a different thread I compared your average synth with your average multiplayer online game. The synth may cost $150 or $200, but the game will cost $50 or $60 and then about $15 a month . . . if you play it a year it'll cost you $230 to $240. But I don't hear any players complaining about that.

And I do know people in the computer game industry. I'm sure music technology is rather similar. It takes a lot of time and resources to program new music technology and the number of units actually sold for the average product is relatively small.

In my mind, if anything, commercial music software developers are being hurt most by all the cheap/free quality synths out there. It's a question of supply and demand. If the free synths can rival the commercial ones (4 or 5 free synths might easily cover most of the sounds and features of a very good commercial synth), and the supply of free synths is high, it drives down the demand for commercial product and limits what people are willing to spend for it.

For musicians this is a good thing, but added to that very organic market situation is the pressure that warez puts on software developers. As hard as it is to prove out the actual damage this causes, it's definitely an additional drain on the commercial developers' ability to make a decent living creating new and innovative products.

If software synths were such a lucrative market, believe me, the big synth manufacturers (Roland, Yamaha, Alesis, et. al.) would be dominating the market. The fact that only a few hardware synth stallwarts have joined the market, and the fact that some software manufacturers are moving to hardware based systems, indicates that the software market is a tough one in which to make a decent profit.

why are most soft synths and effects so expensive?