Reply To: UAD Signature Edition v2 – $124

[Peter DeLegge]

On Barrie said

Yea, that Musio deal at $149 is great. But for those of us that got sucked into their marketing for the “lifetime” (at $499) have NEVER seen anything more from them.

“Lifetime grants a perpetual license for all instruments and collections released this year (including the ones listed on our Coming Soon roadmap for 2023), with future upgrades available starting in 2024 when we eventually roll more new additions into this package (and it becomes Musio 2, then Musio 3, etc).”

Two plus years in and NOTHING new. So yea, I honestly have to agree with Mike and am not optimistic about their future. In addition to the CEO stepping down… then coming back over a year later.. and still very little communication.

 

Yes, the Musio lifetime deal was not a good deal, and, I don’t want to get anyone upset with me, but it was rather obvious upfront that Cinesamples was not in good financial condition when they had that offer. Lifetime deals are — pretty much as a rule — not made by financially stable companies. They’re commonly made by upstarts that can’t get funded by traditional means; so they come with a high risk that the lifetime you’re getting will be short-lived. Lifetime deals, of course, are not a viable way to run a business, and there’s a very high rate of companies that do lifetime deals going out of business (from a guy who has spent most of his career in tech).

When I saw Cinesamples doing that deal — just several months after the other co-founder (Mike B.) left the company — it was a red flag they were having problems. We now know what was kind of appearent, that they needed to raise cash fast to keep the people employed/to keep the lights on. Of course, they ended up laying people off. If I had advised them, I would have recommended that they didn’t put every sample library into their perpetual license offering. Musio 1 Perpetual License version could have sold just as well IF it included less than half of the sample libraries it includes. When they put everything into that package — especially at a time when the business was in the red (both CEOs have acknowledged that) — they created a problem. They didn’t have the funds to pay for big orchestral sample sessions. They were cash-strapped.  So it was rather obvious that they weren’t going to be releasing a Musio 2 in the next year, if ever. I have no idea how anyone believed that was possible (sorry, it defies logic). I don’t know how they pushed out that idea, if they were deceiving themselves or what was going on — but it was not anything close to reality.

So, let’s get to what Greene did to your investment — because he sabotaged Cinesamples as much as he could, weaponizing his power as the owner of a very popular composers’ forum (where people buy a ton of sample libraries) to do that. That played a major role why Cinesamples wasn’t even able to deliver a modest second set of libraries. Greene went after several competitors, but he VERY STRATEGICALLY went after Cinesamples and 8Dio, enlisting the help of some fellow competitors and their contractors to make a series of vicious and extremely dishonest attacks intended to harm these competitors. Greene not only censored me from telling the truth about his attack on 8Dio (it was premised on a false account that 8Dio threatens people who give them reviews, using Mario / Evil Dragon as the foundation of the attack; I actually gave him advice years earlier for the story he told, that’s how i know he was intentionally lying — he had been working for Soniokinetic on a library, when it was released he did a faux review of it, talking it up and comparing it to Troels’ sample library — not diclosuing that he — Mario — actually did the scripting on the library and likely made royalties on the sales of the library; Mario falsely claimed that Troels was angry at him for giving his library a poor review, a complete lie; I had given Mario — through a mutual developer — advice on how to handle the situation with Troels back when he did the faux review, and Mario knew then what he did was wrong and unethical, but in the service of Mike Greene, he spun the story that he was just giving an honest review of a Troels’ sample library; Mario admitted the truth in a series of posts in the attack thread, but Greene deleted them and told me not to share any more about the situation because he hates — his word — 8Dio and thinks their pricing is destroying the industry).

So, all of the Mike Greene and his pals attacks on 8Dio and Cinesamples were the result of one main thing, that they were deep discounting libraries that compete against Greene’s Realitone libraries and Greene was concerned they would change pricing for sample libraries and destroy his ability to command large profit margins. Greene’s timing was even more sinister. He knew that Cinesamples / Musio and 8Dio were trying to get third-party sample developers abord their respective platforms, so he wanted to create an environment where developers were afraid to do that — and he succeeded.

If he didn’t do that, I suspect Cinesamples and for certain 8Dio (which I’ve advised) would have been more successful in bringing aboard independent third-party sample developers and that would have, for example, funded more first-party sample libraries. There’s a lot more to the story, but I’ll stop there.

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