how many are using sequencers and pluings today?

[arke]

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.

you are too funnay.

How's this for a laugh. Nobody has said they noticed what I noticed when I compiled those figures: the brand choices. Put those products into a list without the download numbers, and make your own prediction which products would be most popular. OK a million people offered a free car would say yes, but what if they were offered any brand and make of car. How many would choose the Nissan Micra over the Aston Martin?

I would not have predicted that in a totally unconstrained situation that the synths would be the least downloaded products, or that Mic Modeller would be four times more popular than Autotune, or that Tracktor would be so overwhelmingly the product theft of choice. Says something about the market that does. It indicates concious choices being made with a degree of informed knowledge behind those choices.

you are too funnay

Traktor is a DJ Studio. Not an audio production app.

Second, a "VST Plugin Synth" doesn't tell anyone anything but a "Microphone Modeller" does. Many young people have crappy guitars that know a few lame chords and want to record it onto computer (kinda like I did), are frustrated that it sounds like crap, and think a Microphone Modeller would make it sound better, so they download it.

Finally, the more seeders there are, the more reseeders there will be, so the numbers are exponential. I think you should redo your calculations with the square root to get rid of reseeders, halve that to get rid of those that don't know what to do with it, and halve that again for those that will buy it eventually and/or don't like it and delete it again. The Amp modeller went from 4079 to 16, a price of just over $3000 instead of nearly a million.

And really, how much of a COMPLETE LACK OF A LIFE do you have to go to warez sites and calculate the money lost out of fun? Sheesh.

[stag]

Bones your sound chain is strong as its weakest link. An RME card compared with US122 on a cheap headphones will be pointeless.

Hanafih makes a strong case.
The price of software perhaps is too inflactioned due to piracy, if every user of FLS payied it then they could sell it for a third of the price or less and Image-line would have the same profit... Piracy hurts consumers as well by heigthen the prices of software and dificulting further development.

[stefancrs]

Why would they sell it for a lower price if all the users would pay anyway? A higher price seems more appropriate

[HanafiH]

The effect of software piracy is to force prices down because demand goes down.

Think of a late-night-booze owner that has an infinite supply of beers. If he prices his beers at one cent a bottle, he'll have winos queuing up as far the eye can see, and no matter how fast he hits the cash register, the return on his time won't make the game worth the candle. Equally, if he tries charging a hundred dollars a beer, almost nobody will buy it because they'll go somewhere cheaper. The store owner will price his beers at the optimum for his operation.

If some of the winos go off and start brewing thier own beers, fewer of them will go to the shop, so the owner will drop the price closer to the 1 cent price to bring more of them in. It's counter-intuitive but is how the market actually works.

Where it gets damnably ugly is when there's four retails all with an infinite amount of booze. At first there's enough customers to go around. After a while most people who are going to buy or brew beer are doing it already. Each retailer must persuade enough customers to come buy from their shops whilst keeping the price they charge above breakeven or better. Cubourg makes sure nobody else can brew their recipe, Cakeweiser makes the recipe public but makes sure nobody else can brew it as well, and so on.

So the retailers do two things: they start desperately trying to persuade people who don't drink beers to start (make the vertical market larger) and start kicking shit out of each other (make the horizontal supply smaller). Some go out of business. Others buy up the competition.

Eventually the market reaches an equilibrium in which the businesses can just sustain their viability.

For audio vendors, that level is too low to compete with the whisky distillers.

[BONES]

Bones your sound chain is strong as its weakest link. An RME card compared with US122 on a cheap headphones will be pointeless.

And your point is? Like I said, I cannot tell the difference between high-end CD players and my Walkperson on my very good hi-fi. My point is that DA/AD converters are not as critical as so many people here seem to think, especially for monitoring purposes. If you are doing a lot of recording and have really sensitive microphones, then you might wanna go for better converers but for what the vast majority of us do, any pro-sumer level stuff is going to be more than adequate.

[HanafiH]

What's that Sooty? An RME? Sorry but my ears are blown completely to f**k.

[stag]

Bones your sound chain is strong as its weakest link. An RME card compared with US122 on a cheap headphones will be pointeless.

And your point is? Like I said, I cannot tell the difference between high-end CD players and my Walkperson on my very good hi-fi. My point is that DA/AD converters are not as critical as so many people here seem to think, especially for monitoring purposes. If you are doing a lot of recording and have really sensitive microphones, then you might wanna go for better converers but for what the vast majority of us do, any pro-sumer level stuff is going to be more than adequate.

I think you expressed my point better than i could ever done, it´s all a matter of balance ence a chain being stronger as it is its weakest link.

@Hanafih, thank for your thougths, you really seem versed on marketing issues.
I draw a line bettwen piracy and the rest of the market, of course it only exist in moral and legal terms.

Bye