Reply To: ⚡40% Off Any Library at Spitfire with Code – TODAY ONLY!!!

[Peter Woods]

I don’t know if I have the time to write a full article, but I realize there’s a ton of speculation about Spitfire. Right off the bat, I want to make clear that I’ve never consulted to Spitfire or Splice and I don’t know anyone from either company personally or casually and I don’t have an affiliate relationship with Spitfire or Splice. I’m a regular paying customer of Spitfire and have never been a customer of Splice, as I am not a big user of loops or one-shot samples; I primarily use sample libraries along with MIDI controllers. I’m looking at this as business and marketing strategist who has provided consulting to this industry for more than two decades, because I see a lot of folks speculating, and candidly, while I get their biases and concerns, they’re getting a whole lot wrong — to the point of being blind to some undeniable facts — so I want to point out some very significant facts and share some basic insights about business strategy.

While I can’t predict the future, I do know that the knee-jerk reaction that Spitfire is going to stop selling Spitfire sample libraries and do everything as a subscription is a leap that defies logic. Why? While most of Splice’s revenue comes from their subscription service, they also sell perpetual license plugins for both straight out purchase and using the rent-to-own model, which results in the customer owning a perpetual license when they have fully paid for their product. The rent-to-own model is increasingly popular with retailers, and it’s different than the subscription model. It aims at lower-income consumers and gives them away to use the product before they’ve fully paid for it.

Here are some potential strategies that Splice is considering (and I’m sure that they’re planning on more than one):

(1) Expanding their reach with the cinematic/games music audience and looking to bring them into the fold of their services.

(2) Expanding the breadth of their product offerings with orchestral and other libraries produced by Spitfire.

(3) Attempting to lead the composer market with offerings for composers and more mainstreamed versions for their typical Splice customer audience/target market.

(4) Use their resources to bring AI to orchestral sample libraries that makes them more accessible to a wider audience. This is what Splice’s CEO has stated the company plans on doing, and it makes sense. How they execute that go about that strategy is the thing we don’t know. But I would think the idea that they’re going to abandon the composer market is an assumption without a foundation. It lacks any reasonable supporting logic. In this situation, I could not imagine that the acquiring company would make a decision to give up Spitfire’s customer base. No, that’s certainly part of why Splice acquired Spitfire. That customer base likely yields higher profit margins than many of Splice’s products and the average purchase is certainly considerably higher than that of Splice. That leads to the likelihood that Splice will NOT abandon Spitfire’s sample library lines. They’ll likely make changes, but abandon the customer base and high margins? I don’t see that.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

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