Reply To: Mini Review of Musio, My Pick for Best BF Deal of 2024; $149 Sale Ends Dec 10

[Peter DeLegge]

On antler said

I appreciate the honesty/transparency and hope Musio succeeds. Prior to launching Musio, I had wondered if Cinesamples was financially in trouble as they had a few years of back-to-back sales on their Kontakt libraries.

When Mike Barry left Cinesamples, I knew that wasn’t a good sign. Now Chris has confirmed that they were doing poorly but the ship has been straightened out. I wouldn’t correlate big sales with a company struggling. Yes, it certainly does happen to bring in revenue quickly, but right now, the industry is seeing disruption in the pricing model. Cinesamples, 8Dio and Native Instruments led that change on the sample library front, while Waves led it on the effects plugin front. It does mean that a lot of small developers are going to have to learn very quickly how to get better at marketing and move a lot more product to make the same profits, because margins are shrinking.

If you were just getting your feet wet with cinematic recording, Musio and SoundPaint and their vast catalog of great sample libraries that has long ago paid for production costs, so its really just paying the royalties of those involved in the production and data costs, puts them both in excellent positions do very well as prices come dramatically down. If that brings more people into the market — and their respective customer basses — they can introduce new libraries at lower costs. Of course, those libraries won’t be as inexpensive as libraries made a decade or more ago whose production costs are fully paid, but it will be substantially less cost than if they had a much smaller customer base. For hobbyists, like us, there’s a benefit to supporting these developers as they lead the way in driving down prices for pro-quality sample libraries.

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