Reply To: Your Thoughts on Black Friday Season So Far…

[LinkedMusicians]

On anxiousmofo said

On lastcall said

On UAD: Everybody has the cheapies, so the discount aren’t really awesome.
If you are kind of a noob (like I was) then discounts are great.
So for me UAD BF sales are kind of meh right now.

 

Softube still too expensive.

Agree that Softube doesn’t really seem to be trying or reading the market.  Maybe it will become more exciting around BF/CM proper.

 

A shame because I’m a big fan of Softube.

Tangled roots perplex her ways.

It’s a tough time for developers to navigate the market. Historically, I’ve told developers to NOT deep discount, that the lowest price you sell a product for becomes it’s new value in consumers’ minds. But we’re seeing major price disruption in the past couple of years. My heart goes out to the small developers — and most of them are small, even the ones we consider big are really small companies with 2 to 50 employees — are trying to figure out how to navigate the new realities in the market. And, I’ll share that I have recently advised developers to re-assess ALL of their pricing and strongly consider adjusting it lower due to the changed marketplace.

I don’t think Softube is out of touch. I think what’s really happening is that we’re seeing a lot of these developers don’t have a strategy besides discounting the hell out of everything. That’s a dangerous strategy and it’s one that’s become very common. It’s worked for Waves because they have other — what I’d consider ethically problematic — techniques to charge customers after the initial sale on their purchase. While Universal Audio’s deals have been amazing, if I were a shareholder, I would be deeply concerned about the business and what they’ve done to their brand image. They’ve reached a much larger market than they did several years ago. Think Peter Gabriel with “So” or Bowie with “Let’s Dance.” I strill love it, but it forever changed those artists’ images with the public. That could very likely mean a lot less money goes into R&D, so the brand no longer remains on the cutting edge. It also could reflect a company desperate to bring in revenue quickly to retain staff or pay bills (it’s no secret that Universal Audio has recently had financial struggles and appears to have laid off some staff).

So, if you’re a company that’s doing well, and let’s say that’s Softube, following the others into the world of sub $50, constantly on sale, plugins is a dangerous move that could lead to bankruptcy. If I were leading one of these companies — I would be more prone to only  put certain plugins into the deep discounted range and keep others in the premium price category.  Your business really has to learn how to sell to a larger audience once you start selling $29 plugins. In the sample developer world. this is why you see developers like Greene / Realitone, Impact Soundworks and more recently, VSL attacking competitors like 8Dio and Musio for deep discounting and creating new product lines like SoundPaint and Musio that sell high quality libraries at significantly lower prices than the market has previously seen for that level of quality.

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