ROLI's writing on the wall happened

[SLiC]

This makes me wonder if NI/ Izotope are in the same route.

I wondered about IKs future, when you start to give 10 products away free for every product bought I wonder where the future sales will come from…

[drewfx]

So the new strategy is to help beginners learn to play via subscription?

Is everyone involved too stupid to know that beginners will either:

1. Give it up as soon as they find it isn't easy for them and cancel the subscription.

or

2. Actually learn to play and cancel the subscription.

or

3. There is no 3.

[digitalboytn]

Roli were paying that in house chef too much

[Double Tap]

What were the signs that made some people here unsurprised by this news?

And how do I spot which other music companies are in a similarly precarious position?

[gaggle of hermits]

What were the signs that made some people here unsurprised by this news?

And how do I spot which other music companies are in a similarly precarious position?

random acquisitions, supply issues (though much of that would have been out of their hands last year), just the scale of the money that went into the company in the first place. a product like the seaboard needs a fair amount of upfront cash for all the moulds and tooling but the level they were at just indicated the company could never make the money back from seaboards, which is probably why they went shopping for software companies.

[Ploki]

I hope that their going under doesn't discourage software developers from supporting MPE in their products.

I think that is unlikely... The Erae Touch has just started shipping... a new MPE controller. Osmose is not far away. And MPE steadily gets added to hardware and software synths.

Erae touch looks like a giant lightpad. Neat

[Ploki]

This makes me wonder if NI/ Izotope are in the same route.

I wondered about IKs future, when you start to give 10 products away free for every product bought I wonder where the future sales will come from…

Subscription

[Double Tap]

What were the signs that made some people here unsurprised by this news?

And how do I spot which other music companies are in a similarly precarious position?

random acquisitions, supply issues (though much of that would have been out of their hands last year), just the scale of the money that went into the company in the first place. a product like the seaboard needs a fair amount of upfront cash for all the moulds and tooling but the level they were at just indicated the company could never make the money back from seaboards, which is probably why they went shopping for software companies.

Fascinating - thanks

[whyterabbyt]

What were the signs that made some people here unsurprised by this news?

niche products, ludicrous VC funding, overambitious company acquisitions.

and more recently, a big change in focus, new divergently niche products, standstill in their innovations, and resale of some of those big acquisitions.

[AdvancedFollower]

This makes me wonder if NI/ Izotope are in the same route.

I wondered about IKs future, when you start to give 10 products away free for every product bought I wonder where the future sales will come from…

It's no the first IK Group Buy, in fact they've done it every year for the last several years and still seem to be doing fine.

They have a very large product range, and there are constantly new products being added. People who need to obsessively collect every plugin like it's some Pokemon game will still be able to spend thousands even after this group buy.

Also, the group buy isn't as great as it looks, as it doesn't apply to bundles. For example, T-Racks 5 Max incudes 38 plugins for €500 (€13 per plugin) where as if you buy them as singles during the group buy, they're €50 - €125 each. Even with the "buy one, get 10 free" deal, it's probably better to just buy T-Racks 5 Max during a regular sale.

[ThomasHelzle]

This makes me wonder if NI / Izotope are in the same route.

I'd say yes, but in a different way.

Look at the latest move of NI, selling stuff at Plugin Boutique in some random bundles and giving away freebies. Looks like quite a significant change in policy to me.

So far it was the tiers of Komplete and their well known sales + a christmas gift.

Now they are just another vendor with too many tools and too little innovation, since all those tools need to get at least a minimum of maintenance. So the catalogue drags them down and away from the good new stuff. Massive X drags it's feet in the most basic areas for a long time now for instance. VST3 took ages. Many of the older tools will probably never see a serious update.

And from their whole catalogue, only Kontakt is what I'd call a "Photoshop" like application.
Everything else I could do without.

Like Izotope, their stuff is good, but with the market a.) being saturated like a turkish sugar cake and b.) free stuff at the level of Vital, those companies tend to turn into Waves, Air, IK, PA you name it.

Software is very costly to maintain, but almost free to multiply, so that drives you into a corner in the long run and hardly any companies can make that work without peddling to the G.A.S. addicted who don't buy what they need and actually use but fill their harddrives with things that don't help them but can't help it.
I would guess that 75-90% of the audio market is actually based on that.
You can call it dreams, I call it addiction.

On the other hand: Hardware needs to actually be built and either is really good and solves a problem or it's - like in Rolis case - interesting and innovative but not 100% there. All the MPE solutions ATM are only halfway there IMO and so leave most users in a mixed state of love and frustration without real alternatives while being rather expensive.

Lumi is a complete joke in that regard. You can't learn the piano on such a toy, so the next failure is already ahead.

Cheers,

Tom

[digitalboytn]

What were the signs that made some people here unsurprised by this news?

And how do I spot which other music companies are in a similarly precarious position?

It all comes down to basic economics and many of the issues can be attributed to the same fundamental problem...

Unsustainable debt...

Someone has a thought bubble and borrows wads of cheap cash from a smiling private equity company,who tilts the terms and conditions in their favour...

When the expectations from the thought bubble are not realised,the private equity company smiles even more as they take over the company,strip it of it's assets and give themselves a big pat on the back and a fat bonus

Somewhere inside that story is another tale of the meat and the sandwich,but that is a story for another day and I don't want to scare the kids

[fairlyclose]

What were the signs that made some people here unsurprised by this news?

niche products, ludicrous VC funding, overambitious company acquisitions.

and more recently, a big change in focus, new divergently niche products, standstill in their innovations, and resale of some of those big acquisitions.

I am stunned they employ 70 people - that is a huge wages bill. I would have thought ROLI would be the design side and then outsource manufacture

[bob swans]

....... ....... Wonder what'll happen to FXP stuff, though.

I think that died months ago.
Check linkedin for its former head, Angus Hewitt.

rsp

I can't find him. There are several people with that name but none of them fit.

Anyway, yeah it is a shame that Roli is going through tough times. fxpansion made some good products but also allowed themselves to get into a situation where they ended up shelving some excellent products like Tremor, Bloom, and Amber. I have no idea why the continued with Strobe and Cypher but not Amber.

they got the name wrong: Hewlett not Hewett. he’s now at image-line.

So who runs and works on Cypher 2?

IMO one of the issues with software is when the main developer leaves a company, and their code becomes a wall to someone developing it further. Absynth comes to mind.

Angus had a team, I'm fairly sure a few of that team are still employed and looking at Strobe,Cypher and Equators current versions (don't quote me on that though)

[Dearvolt]

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