Reply To: Cinesamples 🎻 Musio 1 for $149 USD is Here!

[peter]

On GoncaloL said

To me that is the question. Will it last?

i have Musio 1 and i think its great, but the price modeling scares me a bit as for the viability of the product.

And it is not because of the rumors, but common sense tbh.

if people buy all that great content for 149$  what will it be their expectations for musio 2? The amount of new content necessary for people to match their expectations based on Musio 1 would be not viable.. even if you consider double that 149$ price.

And the problem with that is that if they struggle to match customers expectations ahead and cant make Musio 2 to work .. what would be the future for the platform as a whole (including Musio 1)

that Musio 1 at 149$ is a steal for what it is that is inquestionable IMO but the price model is in itself a bit scary.

Mike Greene (VI Control), once again, is once again behind another damaging rumor targeting one of his competitors in the orchestral library space that has led the way with deep discounting. Undoubtedly, Cinesamples isn’t going to be able to pull off a Musio 2 with anywhere near the same level of libraries. It’s just too costly to fund going into the studio, hiring the musicians and engineers and turning around to sell it for that low of a price. It makes a lot more sense for older libraries that have long paid back the cost of production. But Musio 1 might be rationalized from a strategy perspective as penetraion pricing; the entry way that gets consumers hooked into the ecosystem. No, the next generation of libraries will not be as inexpensive and how long will it take to create another 80 sample libraries? But being scared? I wouldn’t be scared.

Greene, who I’ve talked to about this area, has a vested interest in seeing 8Dio and Cinesamples fail — and he was very blunt about it publicly on his site. He feels that they’re destroying the industry by making it too hard for him to make the same kind of profit he has historically enjoyed. Bringing prices down so dramatically means he’s going to have to sell A LOT more licenses to bring in the same kind of net profit he’s been accustomed to making. That means he’s going to have to get A LOT better at marketing (he’s a former mid size corporate marketing VP). As a strategist, I think from a competitive standpoint there are points that Greene makes that contain elements of truth, but he mixes them with fabrications that reflect his not too difficult to detect ulterior motives. Yes, as he’s pointed out, the rumor mill has been claiming that Cinesamples may have let some staff go. They could be reducing staff to make the company more lean — to ensure it is efficient. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the business is on the verge of going under, as Greene insinuates. I haven’t heard rumors that they’ve laid off their entire staff off, FTR. So who knows. But Greene serially enjoys using his platform to create speculation that can harm his competitors. Personally, he’s tried to talk me out of consulting to a competitor (8Dio) just because he wanted to harm them and posted things he privately told me he knew to be untrue. So, while he has a big platform, more than half a million visitors each month, we need to not take what he’s claiming as fact, but consider his motivations and long history of attacking his competitors and deleting posts from people who know facts as well as people who simply disagree with him.

I agree with your statement that this strategy does set expectations that they’re unlikely to match and I think that Cinesamples should do some expectation setting, in that regard. Again, clearly, they’re using penetration pricing — extremely low pricing to grab as much market share as they can before their competitors lower prices close to this. It’s a well-established strategy. They’re super aggressive about grabbing market share and they feel a sense of urgency in doing that. And that makes sense. (I have consulted in this space, and there is a dramatic readjustment in pricing currently going on). So the strategy is very low to grab market share — to get new customers aboard the Musio ecosystem — but of course, they can sustain pricing new libraries this low. It’s simply not sustainable. I do think they should have messaged differently — for the reason you stated: it sets up unrealistic market / customer expectations. At some point, they’re absolutely going to need to make corrections. Musio 2, whenever it comes — if it comes — will certainly not offer this many libraries for this price. It could happen now because most of those libraries have already made a profit. It’s different when a developer introduces a new library and spends say the first four months of paying back the costs to make the library (fixed costs, like the studio, rentals, etc. as opposed to variable costs like royalties for musicians and engineers, if applicable).

That said, I think they have such a compelling offer, all they need to do is stay in business to have what arguably is the best deal in the sample development world at this time. Tell me of another developer that can match it? Cinesamples has an impeccable reputation as a developer. Granted, that’s on the Kontakt platform, but nonetheless, there has been a lot of very positive word of mouth / mouse about their Musio platform. As a consumer, I find it very compelling and am almost certainly going to be buying Musio 1. I have yet to hear from anyone who owns it stating that they’re disappointed. If they even did a good job with Piano in Blue and two of the Tina Guo libraries alone, I’d consider this a win. And it’s so much more than that. I think this is something to be excited about. They’ve really been investing in the platform — in improvements. And, outside of Mike Greene, the word from developers is that they have a very talented team.

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