Reply To: SoundIron, ProjectSam, and Audio Ollie Sample Libraries Now Available at Musio

[LinkedMusicians]

An observation with my strategy hat on. I don’t think that Musio is pricing the third-party libraries appropriately and is a BIG mistake for the Musio brand.

The Kontakt version of SoundIron’s Emotional Piano is $149, the Musio version, which I would expect is significantly cut down with less samples and less velocity layers, and no presets, is $119. I think a 20% difference is a giant mistake. True Strike’s pricing makes even less sense; it’s  the same price as the Kontakt Player version of the library.

I think the only way these libraries will sell is at a significantly lower prices than their Kontakt equivalents. Even more, what does the Musio brand stand for? Accessibly priced high-quality sample libraries that are less detailed than their Kontakt counterparts. A cornerstone of the Musio value proposition is that they’re significantly lower cost than Kontakt library equivalents. Twenty percent less is completely inconsistent with the Musio’s value proposition and the identical price to a Kontakt version makes even less sense and completely confuses the marketplace about what the Musio brand stands for.

The Cinesamples folks did a good job by bringing aboard some superb, well-established developers — SoundIron and ProjectSam (I mean no offense to Audio Ollie, but the dev doesn’t have a similar reputation to those two) — but if Musio libraries can’t be priced so close to Kontakt and succeed. I think it’s a big mistake. Maybe they’re planning on using deep discounting in promotions, but I think the list prices need to be a lot lower. This is not a good thing to communicate this pricing to the market. There’s a ton of noise in the industry. Even small brands need to have better focus with their strategy than this. I hope Cinesamples figures this out quickly. SoundPaint has a big edge in that respect. They understand that to capture the market, you can’t price so close to Kontakt. It ruins the entire value proposition of Musio, which is high-quality sample libraries at very accessible pricing. This contradicts that.

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