how many are using sequencers and pluings today?

[HanafiH]

Warez site download figures aren't very relevant probably, as a lot of peoples download stuff just because it's there without even knowing what it is.

I've not done a formal study, but I came across a chinese download site that gave the numbers of units downloaded for software currently on the site, which was everything not just audio, from the last thirty days.

I identified all the audio software on the site, took the download numbers and multiplied that against the cheapest US price I could find. In 30 days that one site alone had delivered six and a half million dollars of software for free. That's more than Steinberg's annual profits in the year concerned.

[stag]

...And this is one site alone... geez, thank god i ain´t no software engineer.

[original flipper]

HI

Isn't that example akin to saying 1 million people accepted a free motor car - but if they had to buy it - 66 people would have done so.

Downloading 'free' software IMO bears no usefull information beyond the fact that many people want something for free but are almost to a man or woman unlikely to buy the goods in question.

The only people likely to buy anything are people who genuinely NEED that product or are impulse buyers with more money than sense (or control?).

To suggest (as an example) that because 5,708 people have download say ... ReFx Vanguard (from a file sharing community) has done the owner out of that amount of sales is misinforming yourself (again, IMO)... what has probably taken place is that 5,697 people have downloaded something that had they had to pay for, they would never have purchased - the other (and this is the interesting part) 11 people will, after some use probably go buy the product.

Flipper.

[nuisance sonore]

I don't understand what you mean by a market for 'computer made music' ? What is the difference between a neo-jazz song composed and recorded with buzz and the same song played by a band and recorder with a hardware 4 track ?

I probably phrased my question wrong, I'm not a native english speaker, I meant market for sequencer and instruments software as in: "how many are using sequencer and plugins today", not market for the actual music that is made.

I've not done a formal study, but I came across a chinese download site that gave the numbers of units downloaded for software currently on the site, which was everything not just audio, from the last thirty days.

I identified all the audio software on the site, took the download numbers and multiplied that against the cheapest US price I could find. In 30 days that one site alone had delivered six and a half million dollars of software for free. That's more than Steinberg's annual profits in the year concerned.

I don't want to sidetrack this thread to another warez discussion, but do you think those download figures immediately transfer into individuals actively producing music on computers?

[GreyLion]

I meant market for sequencer and instruments software as in: "how many are using sequencer and plugins today", not market for the actual music that is made.

Yeah, nuisance, that's the part of this thread that interests me. How many people out there share our little obsession? There's always been a market for physical instruments. Probably always will be, though I've read that the synth market has dropped to a small fraction of what it once was.

Fender and Gibson have probably sold millions of guitars. Of course, there's no way of telling how many of them sat in the attic after a month of effort on the part of the owner.

(As a side note -- I still fantasize about coming across a pristine 1960 tobacco-sunburst Strat going for $100 at a garage sale held after grampaw passed away. But it's only a dream. )

The point is, music continues to be made, regardless. But this digital thang is relatively new. Actually making your own music and recording it, not just playing out (or in your bedroom), used to require lots of money and a high skill level at the technical end.

That's simply not true any more. It's now possible to create a song that will sell in the marketplace, with hardware and software that costs well under a thousand dollars. Yes, it still requires thousands of hours of learning and practice, but it's now doable by anyone.

The Process is now open to the general population, rather than being restricted to those who control the expensive, complex tools.

So, what interests me is getting a grasp of the current population, and perhaps a trend line on this -- How many musically creative people are realizing that the gates to their dreams are now wide open?

I think that, oddly enough, rap tells us something about the drive to make music. It came from the bottom up, by people who needed to do this new thing, and realized that they could do it very cheaply and wthout spending years learning an arcane technology. And it spread through an entire subculture.

I think mass culture is mostly composed of passive consumers of anything creative. But, in some creative fields, fewer people are able to participate, because the cost of entry is so high. I think that the cost of entry has dropped so significantly that it's no longer a barrier. (I can't afford the $2500 Triton, but I can afford the $99 FruityLoops, or the free download). Of course, as with any creative endeavor, you have to put lotsa effort into being good.

I suspect that's the limiter now -- how many people are willing to put in the effort? In the long run, maybe that's the True Market. (The Kazaa Kiddies are irrelevant, except in that downloading provides a gateway to the music-creation addiction. Some of them will find themselves becoming actual computer musicians and spending money on their bad habit.)

Supply and demand is all well and good, but the costs have dropped enough, perhaps, to unleash a pent-up creative demand in the last 4 or 5 years. Look what happened with computer technology itself. When the boxes cost $3000, only geeks like me bought them. Now they can be had for $300, and everybody who wants one, has one. And even uses it, at varying levels of skill.

Very few aspiring musicians these days are actually unaware that they can make a record all by themselves, or with their bandmates, for incredibly cheap, if they want to.

How many of them are taking the plunge?

Take care,

GreyLion

[HanafiH]

Isn't that example akin to saying 1 million people accepted a free motor car - but if they had to buy it - 66 people would have done so.

Downloading 'free' software IMO bears no usefull information beyond the fact that many people want something for free but are almost to a man or woman unlikely to buy the goods in question.

I absolutely agree with that observation. Something I do know about from first hand is the effect taking web sites from free to pay-for-content can have. 2.5 millions hits per day for free, 10,000 a day for a tenner a month.

The big mistake to make is to believe that the value is a tenner a month, it's worth ten a month to 'some' people, some would pay twenty, most would pay nothing. There's no intrinsic value in a osftware market, just the level at which the vendor chooses to set the size of thier market. Urs said something about this on another thread a few days ago. He doesn't want 10,000 users for a cheap price, he'd rather have a 1,000 good customers at a price that makes the scale of the business work.

[HanafiH]

I don't want to sidetrack this thread to another warez discussion, but do you think those download figures immediately transfer into individuals actively producing music on computers?

No, but lets get back on topic. The question is, how many people are using plugs and sequencers today?

The answer is shedloads, a huge big number. It means nothing, particularly to developers and vendors. The question that matters is how people are buying plugs and sequencers, that's the question that matters. Too much discussion is focussed on why, how much, how many do the bad thing. It's the people who do the good thing that really matter.

The world is awash with shite free music. Go to any download space and whatever it is you like there's so much absolute garbage made, mostly by teenage males, who think they're doing real good, when they're not.

The real market for the tools of electronica, and the tools of music production, is as small as it's ever been. That's why CMM only runs 20,000 copies, the freeloaders don't even support that for crying out loud.

Software is the future? How long is the current hardware architecture of your PC and the viability of your OS, going to last? Three years? Going to buy it all again? Or do you have a strategy including the possesion of mobos, cpus, disks and ram that will allow your investment to even remotely approach Yamaha build quality, or TEAC durability, but force you give up the latest thang? I'll still be playing, you'll still be paying and crawling up the learning curve that never ends.

That game is already coming to an end. The heyday of soft was three years ago. Do you think your kids will be looking for an emulation of Absynth? No way, everything you can drool at in CMM today will be as lost in the mists of time as Original BBC Elite, Ultima Underworld and Wolfenstein 3D. And lost along with it will be all the music, all the copies of CMM, and the drivel put about here. And the reason they won't be looking for a retro Absynth is that absolutely no bugger at all will have created the album masterpieces that lend yesterdays old tin boxes such lurid cred today. There'll be the memory of all the bollocks, drones and groans that unlimited access to production brought into being.

[nuisance sonore]

HanafiH, while what you wrote can be factual, or not I have no way of verifying, I don't agree with the overtone of it.

In another thread, I advanced the proposition that the reduction in cost and availability of music production tools had brought about a democratisation of the art form. Such democratisation happened hundreds of years ago in other form of arts, the only resisting field were film making and music. You surmise that such a democratisation in music is bad, that's where we part; it wasn't bad for painting, sculpture or writing and more recently photography, in fact it brought about an explosion of creativity apparent in the diversity of what we can admire today, so I can't see why it would be bad for music and film.

So, some of the painting and sculpture created today are crap; does it really matter? One of my old uncle started painting in his years of retirement, if you were to see what he does you'd probably call it crap while I, on the other hand, am so very happy to see that he found a medium to express his inner self that I really don't care what it looks like if it makes him happy. Isn't it what's important with creative art forms?

Some could argu that you can make music with a rock and a stick, and make composition with pen and paper; come on, it not the same as delivering a complete piece ready to be listened to. As far as I know, we live in the first era of man history where the common man (and woman) can deliver a finished piece of musical art to an audience all made in the comfort of his home and without taking a second mortgage on the said home. Lets face it, music and film were, from living memory, the most expensive art form to practice by a factor of a thousand; that factor is now shrinking fast.

Like GreyLion, I'm curious to see if my assertion is in fact real, if the general public really takes advantage of the new technology and share our little obsession or not.

[HanafiH]

Klitus, I'm bored.

I did find the spreadsheet I made when I found the site I mentioned earlier.

These were the exact figures:

Product, Since, Units dowloaded, Retail Value
Antares Microphone modeler, 19-Dec-03, 4079, $811,721
Antares Auto Tune, 19-Dec-03, 1301, $388,999
Virsyn Tera 2, 18-Dec-03, 2055, $511,695
Antares Filter, 16-Dec-03, 3694, $587,346
Orion Platinum, 16-Dec-03, 5030, $850,070
NI Tractor 2.52, 14-Dec-03, 13067, $2,208,323
NI Absynth 2.04, 14-Dec-03, 1905, $379,095
Spin Audio Roomverb M2, 12-Dec-03, 4705, $446,975

Total Value $6,184,224

The sooner strong protection does happen, the better.

[stag]

period

[kara]

I never said it was a better way of working, I just said it was my way of working.

I was curious is all. After a few months with Fruityloops I found it impossible to go back tho the stupid, little touch-screen on my Trinity, it drove me nuts. I was wondering what it is that keeps you going back to hardware.

In my case it's quit easy to explain.
I'm close to 50 and a professional studio musician, which means that for a living i play what other people tell me play.
At home, writing and recording music, is my hobby. Which means that nothing I've ever written ever has been published. I think it's basicly my way of writing that let's me stick to hardware. I'm not somebody that can write a song starting form a sound. I'll write a complete song and when it is allmost ready i'll ask myself what sounds I want on it.
Basicly this means that I can use my QY sequencer & keyboard only until the song is constructed. So it's a way of working that I like. And I know that it could be done with fruity or orion too.
Sometimes I use Buzz which I have on my laptop to play, but that's only to try a couple of ideas.
In my studio I have a PC that is setup as a sort of receptor and which I use as a vst host, see I'm not complete hardware and I like a couple of softsynth's. But I guess I'm not ready yet to use a software sequencer or trow away a couple of hardware syth I have.

[Guckli]

Softwarewise I started out on Atari running Cubase. In the late 80's. Hardwarewise I started out on piano in 1972. Since the Cubase score functions are a bitch (for me) I still handdraw score a lot for my own use, but as soon as stuff starts to take real form I use the PC. I guess that puts me on some sort of fence here.

And for crying out loud: Can we keep the end- as well as pointless warez discussions out of threads that don't have "WAREZ" in the topic, please. And the kneejerk accusations too, mind.

[flippya2000]

Mostly software and plugins. I'm learning to play the keyboard and can play a few songs, but I'm not v.good. I do use midi to automate parameters tho, so not everything is done with just software.

Also, when improvising with the midi keyboard I sometimes come up with a lead that doesn't have typical note lengths/rhythmic patterns (ie, can't be drawn easily in a sequencer)..

[opia]

I've gone hybrid

[The Chase]

Sorry, I don't get your drift here. D/A conversion i snecessary for monitoring purposes but it happens outside the production pathway. i.e. It has no effect on the actual signal.

Sorry, I usually listen to my synths when I'm composing with them. I also usually listen to the music when I'm mixing it. You appear to be saying that that's irrelevant to the quality of music. You can't hear bits, how ever lovely the Novakill synth (and they are) used to generate them.

A software synth, in musical performance terms, is only as good as the human interface the computer offers the musician, and if I know you, you know that better than most.

He meant when you by a CD of his band, NONE of the sounds ever went through an analog stage before your stereo's D/A converter to play the cd with, except for amybe a few drum samples.