Sibelius Users: A Pressure Group

Interesting activity going on here at sibeliususers.org.  From their description:

Please join us in convincing Avid that it is in everyone’s best interests for them to sell Sibelius.  This will still ease its cash crisis, but will ensure Sibelius lives on in safe hands.

A few salient points for further discussion:

  • Sibelius likely is not making enough money to support the larger staff that it has enjoyed since being acquired by Avid.  Doing a little back-of-the-napkin math based on the acquisition press release from 2006, Sibelius had 180,000 users back then.  Let’s divide that number by 5 years, (36,000 users per year) times the average price of a copy of Sibelius (let’s say around $100 since there are a lot of upgrades and Ed discounts in there).  This gives you about $360,000,000.
  • BUT WAIT – Sibelius was acquired by Avid in 2006 for only $22M.  So obviously the user base number was either a) inflated; b) a guess; or c) accounted for everyone who pirated the software as well as paying users.
  • By 2012, I would assume the paying user :: pirate ratio has probably gotten worse.
  • However, I doubt that’s the only problem.  In the time between the acquisition and the sell-off, I can anecdotally say that Sibelius is being used less by creators of content than arrangers, and other scribes and copyists types in the music world.  DAW-style apps have become the de-facto creative standard, while notation has become a necessity for those who need it (hint: composers no longer “need” it).  I admit this is a blatant opinion, and not something I’ve researched.

A few more points regarding Avid’s earnings:

  • Right before the sell off, Avid reported revenue of $152.1 million, with a net loss of $15.6 million.  They originally paid $22M for Sibelius, and not only can they not make this money back, but they are losing nearly the same amount just based on operating.
  • Avid is one of the only publicly traded media software/hardware-only companies.  The only other one I can think of is Adobe.  Everyone else is either a giant (e.g. Apple, Sony, etc.) or a private single-focus company (e.g. Ableton, Propellerhead, Aja).  This puts an inordinate amount of pressure on the company to remain profitable for its shareholders’ interest.
  • The main focus of their sell-off seems to be to strategically shed businesses they aren’t totally sure about.  For instance – the Education market (one of the original targets that made Avid want to acquire Sibelius in the first place) is changing very rapidly.  No longer is it mandatory to buy something like Sibelius to teach music in a lab.  In fact, some would argue that notation software is unnecessary altogether in a K-12 educational environment.

These lead me to a conjecture: If Sibelius was spun off back into an independent company, it could no longer stand on its own.  A company cannot simply retreat to pre-crisis levels and maintain modernity.  Since 2006, Sibelius (while apparently not generating much profit) had grown into a multitude of educational products, and integrated into somewhat an appendage of Pro Tools.  These projects require more programmers, more QA, more salespeople, etc.  The group (save Sibelius) seems fixated on saving the main UK office, but ignores the reality that Sibelius has changed quite a bit since growing out of that office.

Between this, and the possible hostile takeover possibility happening with MakeMusic, the notational software market could soon be in trouble.  But remember people, this is what drove you to Sibelius in the first place – you didn’t like Finale.  Now close your eyes and imagine an app that integrates notation smartly into the modern music making workflow.  Who will make it?  Does it already exist as a small niche product or is it yet to exist?  Will Finale or Sibelius figure out how to survive this decade?  I don’t know.  All I can say is that I stopped using both programs a long time ago.

User Interface of Figure – a case study

Fellow music blogger, Ethan Hein has an excellent study of the ins and outs of Figure’s interface from a usability perspective.

Two interesting notes:

Part of the reason I moved from Reason to Ableton Live is that Ableton looks and works like a computer program. It has its own quirks, but at least everything on the screen has a function.

And later:

Figure has no skeuomorphism whatsoever. It’s all flat-colored polygons and large, friendly text. Everything on the screen is functional; nothing is decorative. Smartphone software forces these kinds of minimalist design choices just by virtue of their limited screen real estate, so iOS apps and mobile web sites tend to be easier on the brain than their desktop counterparts. Propellerhead took the mobile aesthetic and ran with it. Figure is their most attractive and least annoying product by a mile

I’ve said it before, that Ableton has a huge advantage in the mobile space, in that their app already looks like a 21st century mobile app. While many of the core iOS developers are struggling to bring their software “up” to a legitimate level (with a nod to Algoriddim, who has successfully marketed Djay as a competitor to novice apps like Virtual DJ), Ableton could stay the course and bring Live to a mobile device while maintaining many of the UI metaphors present in their desktop app.

▶ Ableton Live 9 – A great leap forward?

Music Radar interviewed quite a few A-list EDM producers on their desired features in Live 9. While many requested very specific, super-technical type things, I think Martin Delaney nails the elephant in the room:

“Ableton is going to get its ass severely kicked if I don’t see some acknowledgement of iOS. I want Live running on iPad, or at least some kind of ‘connected’ app, like Propellerhead’s Figure app. This should be priority number one for Ableton as it should have done this already.”

Let’s pretend we’re Ableton – laser-focused on our one product. Widely used, lauded as one of the best of its kind by professionals in the targeted field. But suddenly, a new platform emerges. Let’s say it takes 4-5 years for this platform to really take over, and people are really using it as their main platform for general purpose computing. Sound familiar?

November 2001: MOTU Digital Performer v3 released about the same time as OSX 10.1 “Cheetah”. At this point, Ableton was still being invented. The cool kids used MOTU to do recordings. Very shortly after this, Ableton Live version 1.1 was first announced, and was one of the first DAW’s to run natively on OSX.

Fast forward:

November 2009: Ableton releases Max for Live released a few months ahead of iOS 4 and of course, the iPad. While my thoughts on the iPad as a desktop replacement are well documented, I think future generations will look back to January 2010 in the same way we watch the 1984 introduction of the Mac today – an historic turning point in how we use technology.

Anyone still using Digital Performer? *cricket* *cricket* That’s what I thought.

Who is the Ableton of today? What spunky new company is going to win the hearts and minds of producers, engineers and DJ’s today? The iPad (3) is fully capable of doing what a 2001 Mac could do – audio, storage, and throughput-wise. Why haven’t we seen the giant leap forward in audio software that we saw in 2001?

Two scenarios are possible:

  1. The next big thing is out there, incubating, or maybe exists already in nascent form. Some tiny audio software company just might make the next big thing – a universal DAW type app that runs perfectly on iOS, eschews cheesy design language, and propels the platform into an era of true audio productivity. Ableton continues serving its desktop users until said users get bored and try out whatever this new hotness is.
  2. Ableton (or Propellerhead, or Steinberg…eh probably not Steinberg) foresees this scenario, and is working on it.
It’s been about three years since a major release of Live. In software-years, that’s a long time.
If the pitch for Ableton Live 9 is simply a laundry list of feature add-ons like most of what I read in the Music Radar article, it’s going to leave open a huge opportunity for a challenger to emerge – both in the desktop and mobile space. It’s clear that more and more young people are skipping the computer phase totally, and moving straight to iPads. I’m hoping for more than “some acknowledgement of iOS”. Ableton absolutely has to be seeing the potential out there – just about every DAW company has shown its cards as to its iOS strategy.
In summary:

Propellerhead is slowly ditching photorealism

Propellerhead just detailed some new Rack Extensions for Reason that are being released directly from them.

Rack Extensions are a great idea, and a possible answer to the question of how to do plugins in the era of sandboxed apps. (I’d kill…KILL for a Max-for-Live-ish tool for creating these)

However cool the plugins themselves may be, there is a buried lead – Reason is starting to look more like Figure. Compare Pulsar with Thor – visually speaking it’s like comparing 90’s Vertigo comics to Pictures for Sad Children; both are deep in their respective ways, but one is visually much simpler, and delivers the information far more directly.

The trend in lots of software right now is to ditch old timey metaphors and go “pure digital”. Ableton has been “pure digital” all along, Propellerhead is getting there. What about Logic? Pro Tools? Wood Panel Band? Hello?