Not just guessing. There are numbers. They are a bit squishy, to be fair but they are there. And they favor, for the size of the market for products, traditional instrumentation over electronic music production. Earlier I quoted Ableton at 60-70 million and Gibson at almost 500. The reply was that on a particular website (which might have only been quoting financials from the American branch of the company.) of 200 some million. I found other quotes having Ableton at 10-20 million. You can say, “well we don’t really know” but you can see the orders of magnitude in the ranges. No DAW/vst company has consistent triple digits in revenue, and most are in the low doubles.Teksonik wrote: Thu Nov 04, 2021 2:39 pm No nothing wrong with the discussion as long as we all know we're just guessing.
Roland is the one standout of a known “electronic” instrument reputation at about 700 million. But they do a ton of traditional-ish instruments, which is probably the bulk of it (digital pianos mainly), and they also sell lots of guitar products.
You can say that there’s a ton of kids who play around with apps on phones too, which is probably fair, but that’s one of the problems of that market. That doesn’t make the money that hard instruments do. I just think that there’s sort of a bubble about music production fed by media impressions of pop music. But there’s millions of kids learning instruments, and dudes and dudettes plunking away on acoustic guitars on the couch with zero intention of creating anything. It’s huge.
Retail is nearly dead. But in spite of that, there are 15 solid businesses within 20 miles of my house where I can go get a guitar or amp. For my electronic needs, if it isn’t in the small room at guitar center next to the enormous room with the guitar stuff, I gotta get it online…. I just think you guys don’t realize how enormous the casual market is.
