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

[LinkedMusicians]

On Kirean said

I think they were asking about VSL’s involvement.

Haha. Okay. That’s simple. And, BTW, I end up hearing about all of this stuff from developers I know and occasionally, I’ll go to VI-Control to read what they’ve told me about. In the case of VSL, the developer joined in on Greene’s attacks on Cinesamples. He basically will join in threads where Greene spreads damaging rumors that Cinesamples is ready to go under and people should be afraid to buy their sample libraries because they probably won’t be in business much longer, and disparages their managers as bad people and liars (in reality, he’s projecting). Once you understand what’s going on, you can go back and read their comments in light of their easy to see motives.

The attacks and dialogue are very contrived, an attempt to manipulate sample library buyers. These are competitors of the businesses that they’re disparaging. Underneath the attacks is a desire to see the lower prices that 8Dio and Cinesamples have  led the way on, fail. I can’t recall the name of the owner of VSL and I don’t know him personally, but he has been joining in Greene’s attacks on Cinemesamples and so have some other developers beyond Andrew Aversa (Impact Soundworks). It’s really as simple as a deliberate effort to try to damage the developers who are leading the way in selling more affordable orchestral sample libraries. It’s motivated by these developers’ fears that their ability to command high margins for their libraries is being threatened and that they can manipulate sample buyers by maligning their competitors and creating rumors that cause buyers to be afraid to buy from them and other developers to be afraid to come aboard their platforms. It has certainly slowed the progress of the developers leading the charge. Being super candid, I think Greene’s attacks on Cinesamples could put them out of business. I know that Greene has caused easily caused both 8Dio and Cinesamples significant financial harm through his efforts.

I think if the average non-pro orchestral sample library buyer understood how this has impacted this market, many would be disgusted. The fact is, we — me included — spend A LOT of money on this stuff. And when business people have the opportunity to make a lot of money, very often you see the worst of many people. And to be clear, I was inspired to create a community after my experiences with Mike Greene, but mostly because of these terrible practices, the toxicity of not just VI-Control, but that’s become commonplace in social media. I made my career from managing digital marketing and writing and speaking about it, but I have kids, early on, I contemplated the ministry instead of music or marketing. I’m ethics driven and I care greatly about how people treat one another. So the driving force for me was to create a place without the toxicity, where very simply,  kindness was the norm, not bad behavior. Now, I realize that we probably can’t scale this to any great degree and ensure that things stay friendly. But I would prefer having a smaller community that is kind than a large one that isn’t kind.

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