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

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On swijaya said

On LinkedMusicians said

and more recently, VSL attacking competitors like 8Dio and Musio

 

What did they do/write/say?

It’s such a long story. I’ve known Mike Greene, the owner of Realitone who purchased VI-Control several years ago, for two decades. Greene has been obsessed with the developers who have been deep discounting for a long time. In particular, he is obsessed with trying to destroy 8Dio and Cinesamples. Because VI-Control is a very popular site, it brings in a lot of money for sample developers. It’s not as big as KVR or Gearspace, but I would estimate that per user, VI-Control users spend more money on sample libraries than any of the most popular forums. Greene has, even before he bought VI-Control, a history of hanging around with a group of forum bullies, that attack other developers. Greene is pretty predictable, he calls people mentally ill, stupid, he makes defamatory remarks about people. The developer community sees Greene’s purchase of VI-Control as very bad for the industry, because Greene has terrible ethics and leverages the site to defame and attack his competitors.

Because Vi-Control is such a powerful money-making machine for developers (I knew the previous owner who didn’t have Greene’s skill for monetizing the site; developers big and small have complained to me about Greene shaking them down) Greene has created a group of sycophant developers that join Greene in attacking their competitors. Chief among them is Andrew Aversa, owner of Impact Soundworks (IS), whose employees (technically contractors) have long engaged in practices like doing posts as if they’re unbiased third-parties comparing Impact Soundworks libraries to competitors, basically positioning IS as superior and the competitors as inferior.

So, if you’re a regular at VI-Control (and I once was), Greene has often made long posts about his all-out hatred of 8Dio, commonly dropping f-bombs, stating that they’re “leading the race to the bottom,” a phrase he repeats ad nauseam. Greene has privately communicated with me about this and he’s obsessed with 8Dio specifically, who he blames for sample library prices coming down. A couple of years ago, one of Impact Soundworks contracctors, angry that she couldn’t get six figures from 8Dio for some extensive Kontakt scripts she wrote as a fan project for a retired 8Dio sample library, turned her 8Dio fan thread into an attack on the developer. Her, and another Impact Soundworks employee (technically a contractor) without ever once stating they were stating they were IS contractors, turned the thread into a 40 plus page attack on 8Dio filled with all out libel — stories they privately acknowleged to me directly to be false — in order to destroy 8Dio. Chief among them was a completely false narrative that 8Dio attacks competitors. One of the false stories they told was that Mario / Evil Dragon, had more than a decade earlier, done a “review” on KVR about the co-owner of 8Dio’s former sample library company and he was attacked by Troels and threatened with being sued for giving it a minor criticism of their library. He claimed that Troels told him that he would destroy his reputation just because he said that another sample library was superior to Troels library.

Now I and a developer friend who mentored Mario back then to get his start knew that story to be outrageously false. The truth is, Mario was working as a contractor for Sonokinetic at the time, and did a post on KVR pretending to be unconnected to Sonokinetic, comparing their competitor library to Troels library, claiming that Sonokinetic’s library was far superior. It was a blatant example of deceptive shilling. Troels had sent Mario a PM stating that it was unethical for him to do a review on a sample library he did the Kontakt scripting on and made money and royalties on without disclosing that fact and told him that he could be sued for doing that and could be ruining his reputation in the industry. Mario was worried, he called our mutual developer friend who called me. They looked to me for advice on what to do. I told them that I am confident that it would cost too much money for Troels company (Tonehammer) to sue Mario when Mario lived in Europe and Troels’ company was based in the US. However, the developer and I agreed that what Mario did was completely unethical and he needed to apologize to Troels and not engage in those kinds of practices again. Mario never apologized, instead, as a favor to Mike Greene, he fictionalized what happened in this 8Dio attack thread claiming that Troels once attacked him merely for giving an honest review of his sample library. I had contacted Troels to get him to join the VI-Control thread. Troels told the truth in his response in that thread, Mario lied and claimed he didn’t. The developer mutual friend of Mario and I conversed during that thread — he still had notes on the incident that he sent over to me — we both agreed that Mario was lying and we both reached out to Mario to tell the truth and stop lying and bullying Troels. We were both really disappointed in Mario.  But I posted in the thread telling the true story. To my surprise, Mario acknowledged that what I wrote was true and we had a friendly series of posts where I tried to persuade Mario that he needed to apologize to Troels and stop spreading this dishonest version of events. Mike Greene was furious with me and sent me a series of PMs telling me that he just deleted all of my posts in the thread and Mario’s replies, and told me, very firmly, to “stay out of this,” adding that he hates 8Dio.  Greene ended up deleting more than 100 posts from other people in that thread — as many people were upset to see the blatant bullying of a developer and I’m sure that some of them saw my and Mario’s posts before they were deleted.

There were other stories being shared in the thread that were lies too, one of them concerned the former influencer Cory Pellazari, who I had befriended. Greene created a false story about him too — and in that case, I knew that to be false because I knew Cory and later got to know the co-founder of 8Dio who shared all of the PMs, emails, and info with me. In any event, I had personally many PMs with the Mario and Sarah — the latter who led the attack thread on 8Dio. Sarah had eventually acknowledged that 8Dio didn’t do anything wrong, but if she  acknowledged that or made peace with him it would harm her relationships with her boss, Andrew Aversa and Mike Greene, who she eventually came to believe was manipulating her into attacking 8Dio.

Behind the scenes, Mike Greene was trying to persuade me to join with him on the attack on 8Dio. He showered complements on me to try to manipulate me to join him in the attacks. He made a statement to me to the effect of, sure, it may not be ethical or right, but I hate these people and they’re destroying the industry. He called me a great guy with a “heart of gold” clearly thinking by using flattery I would go along with him. Instead I forwarded his attempt to get me to stop sharing the actual stories and challenging him to 8Dio’s CEO, copying Mike. That was how we parted ways.

Greene has gone after numerous competitors and uses very similar tactics, name calling, and even getting a group of sycophant developers to join with him. He went after Cinesamples very strong, but not to the extent that he went after 8Dio. He goes after his competitors using character attacks, spreading rumors that they’re ready to go out of business, etc. But why did Greene do it with 8Dio and Cinesamples stronger than he went after any other competitors? I know, because he and and used to chat. He was trying to make developers afraid to work with them and make sample buyers afraid to buy from them with their new divisions, SoundPaint and Musio.

Both 8Dio, with SoundPaint, and Cinesamples’  with Musio, had new business models that greatly brought down prices for orchestral sample libraries and required them to bring third party sample library developers aboard their new platform. Greene’s strategy has been to create the perception that 8Dio’s and CInesamples’ owners are sleazy, unethical people that no one should buy from or partner with. Greene personally — in an email I forwarded to 8Dio’s CEO, urged me to never do consulting work to 8Dio, literally stating that he hated them and wanted to see them be destroyed (why, because they were making it very difficult for him to make the same profit margins on his sample library business by selling their libraries for such low prices).

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