Plenty of food for thought there BigFinDrums
Yeah, I was just blowing hard, nothing much to take serious in my post. Just showing a bit of moral support really for the lads who face a lot of frustrated customers at the moment. Thankfully I’m not one.
but what would you need to invest to take (further) market share from the likes of Superior Drummer, AD, etc.?
I wouldn’t even begin to speculate on ‘market share’ as such. There are probably figures out there for it, but for now I’m happy enough with BFD, or the hope that it can be sorted out in a major way in the not too distant future (so I don’t need to look at alternatives). If things don’t right themselves, then I’m happy to jump ship, even if it’s to an inferior software, should that software be more compatible and stable. I think they will get there soon.
Personally, I don’t think the inMusic are thinking about capturing market share, I think they are just focusing on getting the software up to speed - to a decent level where it works for most. It also needs to be noted how much Microsoft have been moving the goalposts for developers, not to mention Apple. What a nightmare. They must be realistic and know that they will never recoup their investment if people are put off by the software. There’s a lot of bad PR around at the moment, not just with BFD, with FXpansion, because of the whole ROLI debacle. People get confused as to who owns what.
I think leveraging the BFD IP with InMusic’s existing portfolio might be fruitful growth area: we’ve seen AIR effects included with BFD3.4 so it does seem a model InMusic have used already.
I’m sure they know what they are doing. But even just that BFD back catalogue itself must be worth its weight in gold, just ready to be taken up by anyone who has a working and stable version of the software that is BFD. Lots of potential for leverage, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing some times. When it works best then both manufacturer and end user can benefit. There’s lots of ways to do that too.
There’s potentially a lot you could do with Alesis - say a drum module with the power of BFD built in, fantastic sounds and realism, and an ecosystem of expansions you can buy to run, standalone, on your kit.
I misunderstood you and went on a bit of a ramble, but I catch up with your thinking later at the end of my post. Sorry about that. I’ll let the other thoughts follow, hopefully it’s not too confusing. **
With regards to ‘leverage’ -
They could just provide BFD free for Akai MPC users, or at least for a nominal price for a base package, then they could reap in the profits from many people buying many different kinds of kits. They really got a lot of bases covered. Metal, Country, Rock, Pop, Jazz…
The MPC ecosystem is known more for being a kind of urban Hip-hop kind of thing. But it’s really not to anyone that knows it. It’s a fully fledged and mature OS for sequencing. Best of class really, today, at this price point (MPC One). They could leverage one against the other if they really knew what they were doing! Get people to buy MPC’s just to play the BFD expanders, get people who bought in to BFD to buy MPC’s to take advantage of them. All in my humble opinion as always. I may be very very wrong, and they might have data and analytics that makes that idea of mine complete lunacy. Then again, it might be an idea they have not thought of yet. Or just don’t know how to implement in the correct fashion. One thing is for sure, a native BFD running on MPC would absolutely clean up. Then you would see those expanders flying out the doors faster than anyone could keep up!
If it was me, I would do this:
1: Anyone that owns MPC that has BFD as well, get a free or just about free piece of software.
2: Anyone that has just MPC, but no BFD, gets to have a trial version/inexpensive version of the software (BFD) that gives them core access for a nominal price, and then if they are serious, they can pay the same as the rest of us for new expanders.
Everyone needs a certain amount of Core sounds, just to check out how this software works. There are people out there that use masses of VSTs and whatnot but have never seen the ecosystem that BFD is. They are confused and confounded when it is presented to them. It’s kind of unique. Barring competitors of course (which pretty much just copied BFD to start with).
I think that could work very well.
So you own an MPC and you own BFD software? - Well have this for free or a tenner!
So you own an MPC (but not BFD) but you want to buy in to the BFD ecosystem? - Have this for 20 quid/dollars/euros.
inMusic get to rake in a little cash, and the end users get to have a whole new ecosystem that they will surely love and buy in to more, or if it’s what they already got, well, it’s nice to be rewarded for loyalty, and when people are rewarded for their loyalty, they tend to buy in to the brand even more and become even more ‘brand loyal’.
No one likes being kicked in the nuts later down the road because they put all their eggs in one basket. And there’s been a bit of that going on here, perceived or otherwise. If people feel valued, they will return that in spades.
But that would mean getting BFD working just about flawlessly on the MPC. At least the core system. It would also mean testing all that other IP, because if people buy that afterwards they will expect it to work. Only inMusic and the core programmers know if this is feasible or not. They might just be laughing or crying right now at my stupid post. It might be a logistical nightmare due to differences in how things were laid out.
**
Having said all that there are other things that Alesis do like their electronic drum kits. And I have absolutely no idea at all, but something like BFD would go great on one of them! Maybe they are included already? I don’t know.
I’m sure the people who are invested in all this and know what they are talking about, know a whole lot better than us rambling on their forum.
Actually the idea of an Alesis drum kit with BFD playing back my finely edited kit that I made up on the computer, sounds like a pretty awesome thing.
