Reply To: Native Instruments Insolvency and Updates

[LinkedMusicians]

If the chatter around the NI M&A discussion is correct, the companies presently in talks with NI/NI’s insolvency administrator are Fender, Focusrite, Yamaha/Steinberg, InMusic, and Adobe — there’s also some social media discussion that deadmau5 and NI’s original founders (Haver and Galic) might be attempting to raise money to buy part of NI.

I have another blog post in the works that weighs the pros and cons of each of the above companies buying Kontakt (I’m just focusing on Kontakt due to my time constraints and my knowledge being the deepest with that product and its ecosystem). I would love to hear from our members, if they could pick the company that think would be best for the future of Kontakt, which one of those it would be.

My pick — by far — is Fender. It has proven that it knows what to do with an acquired software company with PreSonus. Focusrite would be a question mark. They haven’t been great when it comes to managing software. They’ve discontinued a lot of the software they’ve introduced. They definitely operate like a hardware company that doesn’t prioritize or even treat their software lines as equally important.

My concern with Yamaha is that HALion is already the second largest sampler in the industry and buying their competitor would create less competition in the marketplace, which would have negative impacts on innovation and pricing. InMusic would be a nightmare based on their terrible track record with software. Innovation would almost certainly stop as InMusic has a well-known history of not investing even in the maintenance of the software brands they’ve acquired (Air Music Tech and BFD top the list, but there are others). Adobe would be the the worst case scenario of all, as they would almost certainly turn Kontakt and any NI products into subscription-only, leaving current Kontakt perpetual license owners in a very bad position.

I’d love to get everyone’s thoughts. Again, this is a big deal to me because (1) most of the sample libraries I own are Kontakt formatted sample libraries (and I’ve spent a lot of money on Kontakt sample libraries) and (2) I have made a good deal of friends who are sample developers who I know are in a tough spot right now.

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