why are most soft synths and effects so expensive?

[Borogove]

Naturally.. no developer is expecting 1:1, but 10:1 for a product considered to be among two or three market leaders doesn't sound unrealistic.

I'd expect the demo-to-purchase ratio to remain relatively constant regardless of "market leader" ranking. (i.e. the same factors that make someone more likely to buy it make several others more likely to try it.) Mine's around 100:1.

It's quite evident that any idiot can drive a car or operate a cellphone, both of which are much more complex pieces of engineering than your average VSTi.

OT, but my cell phone's UI completely baffles me.

[ew]

Thanks to Jon, Urs, Angus and the rest for chiming in here... it's things like this that make KVR a great place

It seems like there's a great divide in the marketplace and user base; on one hand you have us who grew up on hardware who say "Wow, this is cheap!", and then you have the younger generation who grew up on the original Napster and file sharing in general who think any intellectual property should be cheap if not free. To the latter, all I can do is ask them why should the developers put out anything if they're not compensated fairly for their time, costs and efforts? It'd be the same as you getting a note from your employer saying that you're not getting paid this month because they had to cut costs to satisfy a customer

ew

[nuisance sonore]

Why is it that when it was impossible to pirate musical gear and recording equipment (because it was all hardware) and it cost a significant fraction of the price of your house, people found the money to buy them in the hundreds of thousands, but now that they cost less than your TV, or in some cases less than a good meal or filling your car with petrol, they're suddenly too expensive for even a fraction of those people to afford?

This is a complex question, and I don't think pirating is the only answer, a big factor maybe but not the only one.

There's been a steady decline in product lifesicle since the 70s, I don't have the data but I'm sure even hardware don't sell as many copies of a particualr model compared to 20 or 30 years ago.

There is a multiplication of choices now, so a dilution of a single product market is certainly to be expected.

The steady decline of the cost of equipement required to produce audio visual material as brought along a democratisation of the field, meaning there is more and more peoples who do this as a hobby while maintaining other hobbies and interest; those peoples then weight in the cost of this particular hobby against other interest they might have, not against what it used to cost 20 years ago. And while this opens up new market to developper of hardware and software alike, this market is not used to paying the big bucks for their hobbies, all the while a slew of new product and companies are battling it out for a piece of this expanding market.

I'm sure they are other factors as well.

[Angus_FX]

sosayweall -- I'm not really sure.. the music-technology magazines have given a great deal of coverage to VSTis in general (admittedly not so much to any single plug-in besides a few favourites), and those magazines have circulation figures in the tens of thousands (Electronic Musician, the biggest, claims a circulation of 70,000+).

There does, however, seem to be a huge disconnect somewhere along the line between people reading about plug-ins in the magazine, trying them, and buying them. A glowing, ten-out-of-ten, three-page review in a magazine with 15,000 readers will often generate hardly any sales (10, 20, maybe a hundred if you're really lucky). That's something that baffles me, even today.

[Hunter]

There does, however, seem to be a huge disconnect somewhere along the line between people reading about plug-ins in the magazine, trying them, and buying them. A glowing, ten-out-of-ten, three-page review in a magazine with 15,000 readers will often generate hardly any sales (10, 20, maybe a hundred if you're really lucky). That's something that baffles me, even today.

warez without a doubt. Hang around on some less 'holy' forums than KvR and you have people openly exchanging urls, torrents and now, something I consider far more uncontrollable, upload sites like yousendit, megaupload etc. Within 1 day of joining DOA I had someone PMing me about setting up a torrent of a plug I said was good. These upload sites are a real prob for warez control though.

I'm sure people see PluginX getting 8/10 in the latest CM and jsut go and d/l it. KvR gives a very 'innocent' picture of the VSt world.

[JonHodgson]

Why is it that when it was impossible to pirate musical gear and recording equipment (because it was all hardware) and it cost a significant fraction of the price of your house, people found the money to buy them in the hundreds of thousands, but now that they cost less than your TV, or in some cases less than a good meal or filling your car with petrol, they're suddenly too expensive for even a fraction of those people to afford?

This is a complex question, and I don't think pirating is the only answer, a big factor maybe but not the only one.

There's been a steady decline in product lifesicle since the 70s, I don't have the data but I'm sure even hardware don't sell as many copies of a particualr model compared to 20 or 30 years ago.

There is a multiplication of choices now, so a dilution of a single product market is certainly to be expected.

The steady decline of the cost of equipement required to produce audio visual material as brought along a democratisation of the field, meaning there is more and more peoples who do this as a hobby while maintaining other hobbies and interest; those peoples then weight in the cost of this particular hobby against other interest they might have, not against what it used to cost 20 years ago. And while this opens up new market to developper of hardware and software alike, this market is not used to paying the big bucks for their hobbies, all the while a slew of new product and companies are battling it out for a piece of this expanding market.

I'm sure they are other factors as well.

You're right about the spreading of the market, and to some degree the reduced product lifecycle, however the potential market size has grown exponentially (the democratizing you refer to), and it's not as though people aren't USING the plugins, or DESIRING them (crack downloads show this), it's that they're not PAYING for them.

Look at what hardware sold, look at how many demo downloads there are, how many PCs are sold to people who make music (Be estimated about 2 million a year were bought by "Prosumers" and that's not even counting those who just want to dabble a bit), 5 figure sales of a plugin should be commonplace, and some should be reaching 6 or even 7 figures (3 million people bough Roland GS units)... but instead we're looking at 3 to 4 figures.

Piracy is not the only factor, but I'd say it is by far the biggest.

[Muff Wiggler]

Is it because I have lots of VST? Is it because VST prices are getting higher? I don't know, a bit of both. I do know that when VST prices start to be comparable with hardware, people will for the most part buy hardware instead. I will (and do) anyway.

Comparable with hardware... hmm... I'm in the market for a small hardware modular synth, if you know where to buy a Doepfer or similar for VSTi-money, PM me

i was saying per module. I haven't really priced Doepfer stuff, but Blacet modules are similar - or less if you are talking things like LFOs, CV multis, etc. - to what I pay for a VST.

So I have lots of VST synths and samplers. I surely don't "need" any more. So if I make the same dozen or so purchases that I made last year, only I buy Blacet modules instead of VST plugins, by the end of the year I'm gonna have a really nice modular system (I already have a good start).

No PM needed, I figured I'd share the info with the thread

[sosayweall]

sosayweall -- I'm not really sure.. the music-technology magazines have given a great deal of coverage to VSTis in general (admittedly not so much to any single plug-in besides a few favourites), and those magazines have circulation figures in the tens of thousands (Electronic Musician, the biggest, claims a circulation of 70,000+).

There does, however, seem to be a huge disconnect somewhere along the line between people reading about plug-ins in the magazine, trying them, and buying them. A glowing, ten-out-of-ten, three-page review in a magazine with 15,000 readers will often generate hardly any sales (10, 20, maybe a hundred if you're really lucky). That's something that baffles me, even today.

That's why it seems to me the current marketing/sales/distribution channels are rather incapable of doing what they are supposed to be doing. [edit - 'insufficient' should be a better wording]
As far as I can see, the exsisting channels are rather limited. Listing prodcuts on some bog-standard online retailers doesn't count as marketing at all, IMHO. But that's the only thing these distributors offer at this stage. *not to mention that we small guys only have little influence on them.

I can't really understand the magazine situation either though...The reason why reviews on magazines are not that effective is probably due to that they are not really geared to sell stuff (without meticulously subliminal marketing messages in them)- that's the best I can come up for now.

[waveriderarts]

Well there is a curve of sales depending on the price and I am sure you would make lots more money selling at 25$ than at 299$.

I'm absolutely certain we would not. You can't sell a product like that in a store for 25$

If you think about how many synths and fx you need in your palette, and when you face prices like 180$ US for a simple synth or $200 for a sampler or 400$ for a few mastering effects, it is totally insane. All that will be worth very little someday when the technology will change. And sometime you cannot even re-install on a new computer if the software house is gone.

Let me guess -- you're either a student, unemployed, or don't live in a rich part of the world. That's not to say you don't deserve good software or equipment, of course!

First, if you say you would not make more money with a cheaper price, I have to believe you.... If no ones sells 10,000+ copies of a vsti, then economy of scale won't factor in. I trust you to know you business better than I do! But it is a product I would have bought at 70$ US, and won`t at 300$. Same for all 200$+ US synths and fx. So maybe there are just not enough vst users out there.

Second, your guess about me having a low income is right. But it seems to me that the only one who can afford buying lots of vst/vsti on top of their host are hobbyist who have full time day jobs. For a full time musician, with very low income like most have, it is all very different.


After all, witch is harder, developping vst or living from your music? I think selling your music is a lot harder, so devs won't make me cry because they can`t have an $50 000+ a year income, who`s of their clients is making that money making music?????

[nuffink]

Would anyone know/care to speculate on how many copies of Reason Propellerheads have sold?

[eduardo_b]

As far as download sales go, from talking with other developers there seems to be a pool of a couple of thousand users (including Mac AU as well as VST) who probably account for 80% of all online VST sales, and a smaller group of perhaps 50 individuals who buy pretty much anything that doesn't obviously suck.

Angus,
This may be the most interesting information I've seen on KVR since I joined. A market this small is not likely to provide a decent living to more than a handful of developers, if that. At the same time, it means that commercial plug-in prices can only go up unless the universe of potential customers increases.

...there's a third factor -- it's not the complexity itself, rather that most developers are inexperienced in packaging this complexity in a way that makes it easily accessible to your average inexperienced user. It's quite evident that any idiot can drive a car or operate a cellphone, both of which are much more complex pieces of engineering than your average VSTi.

Yeah, the learning curve really can kill creativity. I find myself making limited progress in music because it takes so much time figuring out how to work the synths. Kind of like having little time to develop products because there's so much support e-mail to answer, right?

[Gargoyle]

Strikes me as ironic really given some (probably many) threads I've read over the past four years or so and this thread now, that the same problems/issues/challenges faced by professional software developers are similar to those faced by professional musicians and wanna-be hobbyists.

I'm not saying that tge genuine hobbyists (like myself) don't understand the issues. But I do wonder, if opinions would change if a hobbyist found themselves in the position of a professional musician relying on it for a living. And therefore that they would perhaps begin to see things from the perspective of a creator/product developer as a result (with all that entails, as so eloquently expressed by some devs here).

I wonder how many would do an "about-turn" about pricing and piracy once they were on the other side of the fence.

Another point I would like to make - that software developers for audio/music applications are like any other small business in many respects. And many here are, like me, one-man bands - I face similar issues in terms of market, competition, time/energy, bills, developing skills, trying to keep body and soul together and so on.

Sometimes there seems to be a denial or amnesia over this fact, partly because as end-users musicians are some of the most subjective, obsessive, hoarding and single-minded people around, and so I think tend to get a bit of a distorted view of the realities for other people. This, I think, is part of that Marxist thing of not understanding the product by way of the materials that went into its production.

All generalisations I know, but I do suspect that some of the above points do hold true at least some of the time for some people at least in some places on some parts of the globe

Note: that last line was my disclaimer

[ew]

Second, your guess about me having a low income is right. But it seems to me that the only one who can afford buying lots of vst/vsti on top of their host are hobbyist who have full time day jobs. For a full time musician, with very low income like most have, it is all very different.

That's a copout, I'm sorry to say. I've worked a full time day job and gigged five nights a week for extended periods of time more than once to pay for gear back in the hardware days...

ew

[eduardo_b]

sosayweall -- I'm not really sure.. the music-technology magazines have given a great deal of coverage to VSTis in general (admittedly not so much to any single plug-in besides a few favourites), and those magazines have circulation figures in the tens of thousands (Electronic Musician, the biggest, claims a circulation of 70,000+).

There does, however, seem to be a huge disconnect somewhere along the line between people reading about plug-ins in the magazine, trying them, and buying them. A glowing, ten-out-of-ten, three-page review in a magazine with 15,000 readers will often generate hardly any sales (10, 20, maybe a hundred if you're really lucky). That's something that baffles me, even today.

A couple of months ago the consumer electronics columnist for the NY Times, David Pogue, wrote about fixing recorded vocals for something (wedding or...I don't remember), and he wrote about using Antares Auto Tune to do this. The first reference to a plug-in I'd seen in a large, general circulation pub. I'm guessing the price for the plug would have eliminated most potential sales for those who clicked on the link to Antares out of curiosity. His remarks about the plug were very positive, but I doubt it did much for their overall sales. And I did wonder if those who bought it would even know how to use it in a host ("what's that?").

[mayan]

Thanks for the fascinating read. It was difficult to read things from the developers' perspectives because it seems so dire. I think you all are heroic and artists. I'm sure like to eat but it's clear that you are doing what you do (for as long as its feasible) for more than $$$$. I just want to express my gratitude to the hearty lot of you who have brought such immense and varied joyful noise into my life.

I don't begrudge you your price-point at all. Sure, everything should be free. Food, wine, recreational substances, clothing, health care and shelter - but not in this current dimension. Software encased in a box with real knobs and led screens ends up costing thousands of dollars. We get something comparable that we can plug into the privacy of our own systems for a couple of hundred - and in some respects, some of what I've seen far surpasses the hardware. I hope, selfishly, that you are able to keep up your heroic, good fight.