How Many Units Does A Hit Synth Sell?

[koalaboy]

Im fairly sure that if the search engines moved certain words to lower ranks or did not list them it would become less of a problem, sometimes i even see a dodgey site listed before the developers and thats when you know it's bad. My guess is they make money from adverts so as long as it pays them they won't change it, then theres all these new quick file sharing sites so if a developer ever got something taken down another would be up in a few days or whatever.

And thus vanishes Net Neutrality even further. A search engine needs to find everything, otherwise it's just a glorified marketing directory. That's even further OT than we already are though.

AFAIK no work has ever been done to identify the impact of piracy; it's all been speculation on Internet forums.

It has, but it's generally been funded by the record industry, and used to justify huge fines. No goverment has taken piracy seriously because the binary newsgroups still exist. Filesharing is just the new favourite.

[Hitch]

All my synths are freeware or come from purchases of Computer Music magazine. It's not that I don't want a commercial synth, it's just that I haven't been able to afford one (Zebra/Fabfilter Twin/Alchemy/FM8/Massive and GURU/Battery, since you ask)...and I wouldn't have been able to extract my money's worth because I am not a natural computer musician. Everything to do with softsynths seems very difficult to me.

However, now that I'm about to attend an evening class for keyboard beginners, I shall be buying a MIDI keyboard controller (M-Audio Oxygen 8 + 49 keys, since you ask again...) and will almost certainly buy a commercial synth when I finish the course in the summer.

Zebra will probably get my cash because I've gradually started to get acquainted with ZebraCM, a fully-finished synth that came with CM mag. The steep learning curve has been discouraging, but I'm gradually getting there: it sounds wonderful. The just about tipped the balance (developers, please, please remember this most important part of your plug-in release), but what has really got my wallet trembling is Urs's willingness to pay taxes. That, and the lego.

To cut a long story short, by placing a completed, unrestricted piece of superb software in my hands, Urs has greatly increased his chances of me funding the German railway network and autobahn system.

But if CamelAudio want to give me a copy of Alchemy for next to nothing, Urs can walk to work.

[amiga909]

first, big thanks to the devs sharing their knowledge (foremost Angus, Urs)

some various comments:

You need to break out of the KvR bubble mindset. Talk to normal, averagely-educated people over age 35, realise how much computers still indimidate the f*** out of most of them.

ur right. not every musician does electronic music and/or is a tech geek. there are (still) way more musicians that can actually play an instrument
maybe it would be the same to wonder why classical writers dont freak out for LaTeX.

Absolutely shite compared to some numpty driving spreadsheets for a bank

..maybe Urs&Co. should flood the market with VSTs that let computers explode, then ask the gov for some 'absolutely necessary' support money (say, 20 billions).
but i guess, it wouldnt work out. FXP&Co. couldnt live with the fact they actually never were able to write a single line of sober code. and everything they did and do is a simulation that is wrecking reality in some years again.

The search engines seem to not care about piracy these days which is one of the reasons why i think it's so bad.

agreed, not to be underestimated: its on google, its ok!
imagine a traditional newspaper telling me about illegal book prints from china... bloody google is too powerful. which company would place adverts (google: adwords) in a newspaper that lists illegal copies of my products within the same search query

[Angus_FX]

Gotta love those provisos...
i.e. only STUPID people would buy a VST.
"employed adult" "serious about playing it" "properly made musical instrument"...

No, that's not my point at all.. what I mean is that, for somebody that has a job and might only own 1 or 2 instruments, $1500 is a reasonable sum to pay, so selling at $150 instead won't make you sell any more.

That isn't the target market for VSTs though, is it? I bet there are at least 200,000 people in the U.K. alone who use their PCs to make music.

Sure there are, but how many of them are that clued up about it? One of the hats I wear outside of FX is that of visiting lecturer at various unis around SE England. Even with Masters students, the majority are scarily clueless (not all of them - some are great, but most.. meh). I've talked to quite a few people in the business of music tech education, and they all say the same. "On my course of 200 students, there are maybe 2 or 3 I'd trust to make tea in my studio", that kind of thing.

I don't know anybody male under the age of 30 who isn't very happy using a PC for just about anything they need.

Some of the technical support enquiries we get at FX raise a large question mark over that statement

Are you suggesting that any studios DON'T use computers nowadays?

No, but there really aren't that many professional studios worldwide (and anyways, unless they have programming suites, they're not necessarily synth customers).

I bet the number of people recording at home who use PCs and Macs is a hundred times greater than those who use a Portastudio (or whatever).

It's greater, but not 100 times. Not even 10 times, unless you're talking under-30's only.

What other options?

Like I said before.. DAWs' built in plugins; Reason; freeware...

We have no idea how much warez (it isn't "piracy") takes away from sales.
I would imagine that loads of teenagers are downloading umpteen different warezed VSTs just because they CAN, not because they had any intention whatsoever of buying them

Agreed 100%, certainly downloads != lost sales.. all we can compare is similarly featured, priced and marketed plugins where there is no crack, a good crack or a bad crack. Even if your product is uncracked though, the cracks for others' products are still competition.. am sure if there was no crack for Synth Squad, a fair lot of people would use a cracked copy of Largo instead, or vice versa.

There are certainly some crackusers who would buy if there was no other option though, and I think it's reasonable to count those ones as lost sales. We've had much the same experience as Urs in relation to sales spiking when timebombs get triggered in the cracks, so it's a real phenomenon.

[WilliamK]

Well, its all relative. I remember that over 15 years ago, (can't recall the time exactly) when I posted on a local BBS forum, that software should be cheaper, so devs would get more sales, hence more money. People tried to kill me...

A few years ago, I tried to say the same thing here, in this very same forum. People did the same... Every time I tried to put this in practical terms, people got angry and complained. But to be honest, its the only way I could have survived so long.

I made mistakes, but I also learned from my own mistakes. My wife has been very supportive, which is great, resulting in even more stuff to learn and improve.

Now, a lot of time has passed, and I can still make a living from coding. But its not easy. One of the reasons I could is that I live in South America, and the local currency ratio is higher than the USD ratio. BUT, it has gone down-hill in the last year, which is not good, but we can still survive...

Now, as for sales, what really makes things good is to really try to help users, not just earn money. Money is required, yes, as I need to pay my bills. But what I want to do, is really be there for people. The past months that's really happening. I was able to get more users happy, and I'm sure that 2010 will come with tons of new stuff on top of that.

But now, for the real question, how many sales do a TOP HIT synth sell? Well, Wusik Station was never been a real TOP HIT, but it got the word around. There were times that we had over 5,000 users who purchased it. Today, I can't really say the number of users as there's a lot of upgrade sales. But I can only imagine what retail software makes... I would say that we have around 1,000 real supportive users today, that really care about us, and that will keep buying from us. But that's a low number, if you check how many piracy is around the net. And yes, piracy IS BAD. Those who think its not, don't really know had bad it is.

But how to improve things up? When I go after software to buy, I only get Downloadable stuff, that are under $99. I try to avoid anything higher than that. (only if I really need it) 100% of my software is legal, so I had to research a lot to find suitable solutions for so little money. www.Serif.com is one of those... So now we should wonder, what about those big companies that only sell retail-boxes, and have higher price marks? Keep in mind that the user is not only buying ONE product, so if the price is too high, he may not buy at all. But what about Studios and those people who have tons of money? Well, they are the smallest % of the whole music market. What's the BIG %? Well, you all know who that is, as we are part of the big %...

What else could I say?

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

warez (it isn't "piracy")

Would you mind to enlighten me about the difference?

I guess you havn't read my post about pirated ACE copies turned into legal licenses by buying customers?

Urs

I'm only half reading this thread (only really paying attention to the developers comments) but I applaud that blowing up crack approach. It's novel, funny, and effective (in that it works to actually drive sales). Good job!

Urs, one day I'll buy one of your synths, you just haven't haven't made the right one for me (think non-modular ACE with simple Minimoog like 3 osc architecture).

[robogone]

certainly downloads != lost sales

There seem to be some people who argue that every illegal download is a lost sale. I'm surprised at the insistence on this from some people.

[Karmacomposer]

Well said, William. I could not agree more.

PRIZM has not sold as well as I would have liked, but I tend to do better during sales, when I slash the price to record lows.

Monstrous sold relatively well, but I put it's price point very very low.

SuperCore will be a very inexpensive synth, so I expect it to do well.

I believe price is one major factor, and as William pointed out, support is the other side of the coin. Both he and I believe in superior customer support - it's vital to virtual instrument success (and most other businesses as well). Urs and KV331 are other companies that strive for excellent support and it shows in their success. I would say that any company that sells a virtual instrument or sampleset/preset product will thrive when issuing top quality support as compared to companies with crappy or no customer support.

Mike

[osiris]

I would be very interested to know how many units AAS sold when it dropped Ultra Analog to rock bottom. I know I bought it. The end of $200 vsti's?

[sonkeysankey]

That's a very interesting question, Osiris, I'd love to know how many units it sold, too.

When it comes to warez, I really think that most people who illegally download warez were never going to buy the real thing anyway. There are just so many excellent freeware synths out there, and so many excellent low priced (sub $50) synths too.
This last year I've bought Harmless ($9 because I had no idea what it was like, didn't really 'need' it at the time, but thought it was too good to miss), Synthmaster 2 (39 Euros with free Synthmaster 1, which is a fantastic synth in its own right), Slicex for £7 on the front of Beat magazine (thanks to the members of this forum), PS-1 secondhand for $20 (a very underrated synth), and Ultra Analog for $15. (Was it? I can't remember the exact price offhand).

That is a veritable smorgasbord of synth power, and I am more than happy with every single one of them.

There really is no reason for anybody who actually USES VSTs to use illegal copies. And I believe that most 'users' of warez don't actually USE them very much, they are more like collectors, who download stuff constantly, more than they can ever use, and these don't represent lost sales, in the majority of cases. I could be wrong, but it's the impression I get when I read what warez users say on forums.

There are just so many fantastic free or very low cost VSTs out there, that nobody can justify illegally copying stuff.

Look at ProteusVX - what a great synth that is - twenty years ago, it would have cost you £500 for a hardware version, that was impossible to program, which you couldn't magically duplicate as many times as you wanted by just opening new instances, and which you would have to record to analogue tape, with all the hassles involved in that. Now look at the power we all have, in even the most bog standard computer.

[sonkeysankey]

Gotta love those provisos...
i.e. only STUPID people would buy a VST.
"employed adult" "serious about playing it" "properly made musical instrument"...

No, that's not my point at all.. what I mean is that, for somebody that has a job and might only own 1 or 2 instruments, $1500 is a reasonable sum to pay, so selling at $150 instead won't make you sell any more.

That only applied twenty years ago, before VSTs existed, and everything HAD to be in hardware. I would never spend $1500 on one or two synths. Look at my list of synths in my previous post. I also have Kubik (that was $40 I believe, and recently had a great free upgrade), and Sampletank 2.5, Sonik Synth 2, and Miroslav, with something like 10 or 11 free expansion packs. That was my most expensive purchase, in a group buy, but I'm very happy with it, because it produces so many usable sounds for me.
There are now tens of millions of computers around, and loads of people want to try making music on them, so they are all potential customers, if the price is right, and if the produce is marketed right - often times, this might mean getting it into a branch of 'Game' or similar outlet, where they sell Magix products in boxes, at a similar price to a PC game (or less). Volume sales with small profits = big enough profit, presumably, otherwise Magix would have gone out of business ages ago.

Look at all the variations on that wretched 'Ejay' thing that I used to see all the time in Game shops, they must have sold tens of thousands of those, I imagine.

That isn't the target market for VSTs though, is it? I bet there are at least 200,000 people in the U.K. alone who use their PCs to make music.

Sure there are, but how many of them are that clued up about it? One of the hats I wear outside of FX is that of visiting lecturer at various unis around SE England. Even with Masters students, the majority are scarily clueless (not all of them - some are great, but most.. meh). I've talked to quite a few people in the business of music tech education, and they all say the same. "On my course of 200 students, there are maybe 2 or 3 I'd trust to make tea in my studio", that kind of thing.

I presume if they know how to operate a PC, and they want to make music on it, they will learn how to install a DAW, and VSTs. It's hardly rocket science.
i.e. just who is using all of these warez copies of VSTs that are all over the internet? I can't imagine they are any easier to install than the real thing!

I don't know anybody male under the age of 30 who isn't very happy using a PC for just about anything they need.

Some of the technical support enquiries we get at FX raise a large question mark over that statement

Maybe it's just the people I know then, but I imagine there must be hundreds of thousands of people who want to make music with their PCs, who aren't afraid to load up a VST, or even Reason for that matter.

Are you suggesting that any studios DON'T use computers nowadays?

No, but there really aren't that many professional studios worldwide (and anyways, unless they have programming suites, they're not necessarily synth customers).

I bet the number of people recording at home who use PCs and Macs is a hundred times greater than those who use a Portastudio (or whatever).

It's greater, but not 100 times. Not even 10 times, unless you're talking under-30's only.

I'm surprised at that figure, due to the cost and ease of use, when using a PC.

What other options?

Like I said before.. DAWs' built in plugins; Reason; freeware...

We have no idea how much warez (it isn't "piracy") takes away from sales.
I would imagine that loads of teenagers are downloading umpteen different warezed VSTs just because they CAN, not because they had any intention whatsoever of buying them

Agreed 100%, certainly downloads != lost sales.. all we can compare is similarly featured, priced and marketed plugins where there is no crack, a good crack or a bad crack. Even if your product is uncracked though, the cracks for others' products are still competition.. am sure if there was no crack for Synth Squad, a fair lot of people would use a cracked copy of Largo instead, or vice versa.

There are certainly some crackusers who would buy if there was no other option though, and I think it's reasonable to count those ones as lost sales. We've had much the same experience as Urs in relation to sales spiking when timebombs get triggered in the cracks, so it's a real phenomenon.

That's very interesting, I didn't realise that.
I see it like this - people who actually have musical talent, and publish their music to a buying public, or client, would be unlikely to use cracked software - at least, that's what I imagine. I just think it would be strange for somebody 'famous' to have some cracked software, which they use on their music, in case somebody asks them "Isn't that 'synth x' on your last single?" and they say "Yes" and know that they're using an illegal copy.

But then I've heard that even big companies have been found to be using 30% cracked software, which is incredible, since they could be checked at any time by some government department which I can't remember the name of right now.


I agree with everything William K said.

[rcat]

I can go into the keyboard section at a guitar center, and I bet maybe 1 in a hundred people could name a single free vsti, the counter guys know a handful of boxed instruments, but to them, Zebra or Wusikstation might as well be exclusives at Toys R Us...

No shit! I find myself educating them, and I'm the LAST person who should be educating anyone on virtual instruments and effects.[/quote][/url]

[sonkeysankey]

warez (it isn't "piracy")

Would you mind to enlighten me about the difference?

I guess you havn't read my post about pirated ACE copies turned into legal licenses by buying customers?

Urs

I mean that the term "piracy" means "attacking a ship in order to steal the contents of it, possibly kill the crew", etc.

Where is your post about pirated ACE copies being turned into legal licenses, I will have a read of it.

I don't mean that 'warez' isn't illegal copying, it is. It's wrong, people shouldn't do it, but it isn't 'piracy'. That term means something quite specific (i.e. what is happening off the coast of Somalia at the moment) and it is quite different.

[sonkeysankey]

3,000 x $200 = $600,000

Nothing to cry about, even it was released twenty years ago...

You'd seriously suggest that a western-european business making only $30,000 a year before costs is 'nothing to cry about'?
You'd have made more working in a shop. As a running business, that would be an abject failure.

For one person's wage over 7 years, it aint too bad. Not Porsche-owning good, though, unlike the picture of developers that people like yourself love to imply. Absolutely shite compared to some numpty driving spreadsheets for a bank, or even for someone who spent 7 years in a semi-successful games company, let alone places like GTA, where the couple of guys Ive known did get Porsches.
As a company's before-costs income, though? Still less than a decent pub turns over in a year.
And that's one of the major players.

edit : and now we have more accurate figures: 3000 copies at $120, with costs of 50% and tax of 40%. i bet you'd sodding cry if that was your sole wage from running your own company for most of a decade.

Well then, perhaps what we can glean from this is that the VST market is too small to make a good living from. Market forces will prevail. If too few people are buying VSTs at price 'x', then some developers will turn it in and do something more profitable, meaning there are less new VSTs coming out. I often wonder if we NEED any new VSTs - all I am interested in are new presets for the ones that already exist.
If no new VSTs were EVER created, wouldn't we all have enough to be going on with forever? As long as people keep producing new presets, it would never get boring.

$30,000 for writing ONE piece of software, twenty years ago, which sold at $30,000 every year for twenty years, would be a fantastic income for me. Write one piece of software - say it takes me two years (I'm nowhere near intelligent enough to do what VST developers have done, by the way), and it sells for twenty years, at a turnover of $30,000 a year? What would I need to do once I'd finished creating the software, apart from bugfixes, minor updates, and support? Sounds like a good wage for doing that.

Obviously it wasn't like that for Zebra, it's only been out for, what, five years? (I don't know). My point being, once the program has been written, it's been written. Updates and bugfixes presumably take a LOT less coding hours, than actually producing the original program from scratch.

[whyterabbyt]

I mean that the term "piracy" means "attacking a ship in order to steal the contents of it, possibly kill the crew", etc.

Where is your post about pirated ACE copies being turned into legal licenses, I will have a read of it.

I don't mean that 'warez' isn't illegal copying, it is. It's wrong, people shouldn't do it, but it isn't 'piracy'. That term means something quite specific (i.e. what is happening off the coast of Somalia at the moment) and it is quite different.

Maybe you need to consult a dictionary.

piracy • noun
1 the practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea.
2 the unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work.