Justin Tokke, the Senior Product Designer at Sibelius, has posted on Facebook that he has been laid off by Avid, and his post ‘eliminated’.
Likely just cost-cutting by the Private Equity owners, but as an enthusiast for Sib, he was a force for good.
I doubt** that this is as ominous as it might seem, after the events of last year; but when companies are in ‘reduce expenditure’ mode, product development is unlikely to flourish.
** (…though what do I know? 
)
Hmmm. Interesting. To be fair, product development has not been flourishing for quite a while with Sibelius. They are updating pretty regularly but long-standing bugs and weaknesses don’t get addressed. And some features get added but never really refined. I was glad when Justin joined as I thought it would be a boost to user interaction - Avid has never really been known to listen to or care about user input. But I never really saw any change in that regard. Who knows how much internal resistance he had to overcome. At any rate, now that Dorico is eating Finale’s lunch, I’m interested to see how/if the Sibelius team reacts. Inertia might not be enough anymore to retain an edge in user count (if they even have one anymore, I don’t know!).
Posted by Justin Tokke on Linkedin:
…what if he reach out to the Dorico team!?
He’s a passionate, 20-year user of Sibelius. Unless Avid actually killed off Sib, I doubt he’d want to switch.
(Not sure your post on LinkedIn is terribly tactful…)
I think I’m more pessimistic than you, LOL. I think it’s likely the “beginning of the end” of Sibelius.
Sib development really slowed down after Avid closed the UK office in 2012. When Justin came on board 3 1/2 years ago, he kicked off a new period of active development where they really seemed to be making substantial improvements. I think this was really positive for the entire notation community. (“A rising tide lifts all boats,” etc.) Back in 2012, there were more or less two competing notation programs, each with a built-in market share of users that would purchase upgrades, plus there was always a next generation of students to try to recruit. That’s just not the situation anymore.
Until last August there were three main paid notation programs, two of which were beholden to much older code, and one which was new with a modern interface and in active development. Finale’s collapse of course was entirely foreseeable for some time now. When I switched to Dorico 5+ years ago, there hadn’t been much Finale development since Peaksware bought them in 2014. I admit I was caught off guard to see it killed off completely, but 3 1/2 years ago I was predicting it would eventually just be rolled into SmartMusic, and if you look at the MakeMusic Cloud interface, that’s not too far off from what happened. (Lack of continued support for .mus and .musx files was a surprise to me though.)
Currently MuseScore just dominates the education market, along with random browser-based programs. (I have students bringing in assignments using software I’ve never even heard of.) The upgrade path to hook students with lower tier software and eventually move them up to the “Pro” version, has to have almost completely dried up, with only a handful of exceptional students making the move to paid software. I have no idea of the numbers, but I think it’s safe to say most music being created nowadays is being created with DAWs. At least in the US, most middle and high school kids have Garage Band in their pocket. The numbers of users that purchase paid notation software has to be collapsing.
In Avid’s last earnings statement before the purchase by STG, they had a net loss of $4.6 million, despite a strong 30.2% increase in subscription revenue. Private equity purchases companies because they think their products will be profitable, or because they think their assets, including intellectual property, will be valuable. The purchase was a financial move, not a passion project. Looking at losses despite strong increases in subscriptions obviously meant that STG wasn’t going to keep the status quo.
Pro Tools is their flagship product and Sib now barely even gets mentioned on their website. Their recent purchase of Wolftech likely shows that they are more interested in pushing further into the media side of things. The odds of them wanting to continue investment into a dwindling field like music notation seems very slim.
Getting Finale to endorse Dorico as the future of music notation, obviously was a great business move by Daniel and co. Justin’s firing could have been a simple business decision as a result of missing that major opportunity for expansion. Or a clash of personalities or vision. Or it could be the beginning of Avid withdrawing from that market space altogether. Or some combination of all of these.
The fact is that there probably isn’t enough market for two paid notation programs anymore with MuseScore gobbling up educational users. Some of the recent developments linking workflow between Sib and Pro Tools might lead one to believe Avid thinks that the Pro Tools notation capabilities are “good enough.” If Avid wants to focus on Pro Tools, Media Composer, and Wolftech, then Sib doesn’t really fit into that vision anymore.
As one of the premier musical instrument manufacturers, Dorico certainly fits into Yamaha’s vision. If you look at Yamaha’s corporate vision in their last annual report, it’s easy to see a space for Steinberg and Dorico. I’m not going to read too much into Justin’s statement that his “position at Avid has been eliminated,” but it will be interesting to see if he is replaced and if so, by whom. Or if it really does mark the “beginning of the end” of Sibelius.
Doomscrolling while on a train and came across this post too:
So no further product design there by anyone that knows anything about notation? Okay …
When looking at Sibelius’ placement of the default(?) font’s time signatures on a system, there hasn’t been anyone at Sibelius with common sense in notation for years. I couldn’t be happier that I started to use Dorico 3.5 years ago. @Nordine’s font adaptations, however, work fine and look good, but that’s not a work of Avid, which explains a lot.
BTW, notation is not the only thing. The comma (,) in Sibelius does not work for Swedish (and perhaps other Nordic) OS, so you cannot specify e.g. 1.5 (or 1,5) as input.
I’ve just finished my last “legacy” projects in Sibelius this Christmas and will never use it again hereon.
(If we only could get the same scripting API in Dorico as in Sibelius. That would be wonderful.)
Hi Mats,
Just to clarify, both these issues were carefully logged by me and the Sibelius team is well aware of them. It is a matter of resourcing to get them into the roadmap, which is a constant struggle. Hopefully the team can get around to them soon.
They told me some weeks ago that they would NOT fix them (after endless emails over some years saying, “We are discussing this with the developers right now”). “Use a US OS” was the solution to the comma problem. There is NO QA at Sibelius, or intention to make it an acceptable engraving software.
As for resources, they can use the old font, which was superior in design. It would take them 2 minutes to replace it in the code repository and, at the same time, possibly reassign the guy who messed up the font in the first place to other duties.
I don’t believe the font itself was the issue, but how it was placed on the staff (some complicated graphical math thing). Either way, I’m not on the team right now so I can’t help you push this further, unfortunately.
Here’s hoping that something good (better?!) turns up for you.
Best.
I hope so too. Thanks for your kind words in the meantime!
Only because MuseScore is free. (Arpagon method).
But I don’t think we can have truly professional software without paying a few pennies from time to time.
Have a look here: MakeMusic, Avid begin 2025 with personnel moves - Scoring Notes
Soon to be three - a re-awakening of Encore/Overture with a whole new v6 onto the market is imminent, I’m seeing…
@Tokkemon - sorry to read of this Justin… I wish you well with whatever comes next. An Avid/Sib community loss. Bigtime.
Encore 6 has been “Coming Soon” for about 3 years. Its development is entirely dependent on one man, who may have many skills, but none of them “customer-facing”.
Indeed… 
But this time, here’s Don himself…
UPDATE – 1/02/2025 – Passport Music Software
Elsewhere indicated a release is coming in the next weeks. And yes ok, all together now, “we’ll believe that when we see it…” etc… (me.? I believe…! )
It still looks like a ‘work in progress’. There are of course a surprising number of other notation apps. (Choose a musical term, and there’s probably an app with that name. Crescendo, Forte, Cappella, …)
But they are decimal points in the market percentage.
The question is: What are the publishers using? What are the TV/Film people using? What is Broadway using? What are the colleges using?
Looking at some of the publishers I “monitor” it seems to be “whatever format is submitted to us”, with varying quality. It seems like the traditional users of SCORE are moving away from it and into “the CTRL-P world of publishing”.
