And they are also owned by
Yeah, but MuseGroup is a little different than a typical PE group. I was just looking into their history a few months ago when Finale went kaput.
Ultimate Guitar was originally Russian-based. They even famously argued that their “site violated no laws because its headquarters were in Russia, and the site’s practices complied with Russian laws.”
Ultimate Guitar purchased MuseScore in 2018, so I assume Russian financing has been involved with MuseScore since then anyway:
In 2021 it rebranded as Muse Group and also bought Audacity that year. The Audacity privacy policy was super sketch, and it got labelled as spyware:
Muse Group then bought Hal Leonard in Dec. 2023, which was a big move into the publishing arena. They are now based in Cyprus and the holding company includes Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, Audacity, StaffPad, Audio.com, Hal Leonard, NoteFlight, Sheet Music Plus, and more. You can see the list on their site.
So yeah, it is a holding company, but it’s at least targeted at the music field. Many of Muse Group’s products are complementary and fit well together into a cohesive corporate entity. Like them or not, at least there is some sort of vision about the music business present in their acquisitions, and they honestly seem to be passionate about music.
STG is different. It’s just private equity out to make money. Look at this list of companies that they own:
I guess they are all “mid-market software and software-enabled tech services,” but other than that, not a lot of other common ground. Certainly there’s nothing in that list that tells me they would care at all about a small, little-used (by global software standards) music notation program.
That’s why I found STG’s move with Justin and the Sibelius team to be ominous. As of March 2023 STG’s “portfolio has consisted of more than 50 global companies and currently has $10 billion of assets under management.” While there is plenty of funding to continue development should they choose to do so, this isn’t a company that would think twice about discontinuing Sibelius if it wasn’t turning a profit, or if it was just too much of a hassle. That’s why I’m not optimistic about the future of Sibelius.
(Y’all are cracking me up with the Fred stuff 
)
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I believe Muse Group is funded by Francisco Partners, which is a private equity firm, and their portfolio of companies is more varied, similar to STG. I’m looking at the similar list on their site, I’m not sure that Francisco Partners has any more music focus than STG does.
That said, I don’t feel it is a similar situation at all. With the free nature of MuseScore and the huge user base that it brings with it, there’s a lot of potential for upsell for other services. MuseScore users have complained in recent days that they’ve been starting to see advertisements in MuseScore itself, popups promoting the for-cost add-on libraries (Berlin, CineSamples, etc) when opening a score. And we obviously also have the musescore.com site with its sheet music sales and subscriptions that get promoted by the software. So the software is clearly being used as a vehicle for selling other things that are a lot bigger. I’m sure we wouldn’t see this amount of backing for MuseScore if they didn’t see dollar signs behind these other related ventures that they are able to upsell.
Sibelius is not in the same situation at all. It isn’t used as a vehicle to sell other things - people buy Sibelius and that’s it. Even if they tried to upsell other things through Sibelius, it’s more likely to anger people since it is not free software, and the user base is much more limited because not everybody can justify the cost of spending that amount of money on notation software if they are just a very light user.
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Tangentially relevant is this poll from VI, which suggests that while some Finale users might move to Sibelius, the vast majority are taking the Dorico plunge.
It’s a reasonable sample size, though of Finale users who are on a forum about audio libraries, which may not be entirely representative.
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Interesting - thanks. As you say, not a straightforward poll but big enough to have a confidence level of around 95%.
The relocation of ex-Finale users among the remaining notation programs was obviously a big issue for the sector. Had it happened years ago I imagine that Sibelius would have cleaned up in much the same way that Dorico has now. The fact that it hasn’t happened will have registered with the senior management at Avid although I wonder whether they’d care. I’ve never been persuaded there was much long-term thinking there.
I’m with Todd on this one - it does look like the beginning of the end.
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Only because Finale users obeyed MakeMusic’s orders (a little too much like sheep, in my opinion, because there was no urgency), and were able to take advantage of a very attractive price (Finale 27 upgrade + Dorico Pro at $149 both).
After that, buying Dorico is one thing, but adopting it and using it is another thing that this survey doesn’t say.
I know quite a few people who wanted to take advantage of the MakeMusic offer, but still haven’t opened Dorico.
From what I can tell from this press release, it sounds like Francisco Partners put together the M&A deal with Muse Group and Hal Leonard and is a minority investor in them. (At least the press release about the deal has the “minority” label attached to it.) I have no idea if minority means 15% or 49%, but it’s not quite the same as STG, which took Avid private and owns them outright.
Completely agree.
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In recent polls I’ve seen on Finale user groups on Facebook (ex. Finale 101), a substantial portion now report no intention to move, continuing to use Finale forever. They seem confident there will be some solution in the future to allow activation of Finale even after the activation server is gone, that “somebody will certainly come up with a solution for it”. It is a big and dangerous gamble.
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In any case, it would be madness to carry out current projects or others immediately to come with new software that you know absolutely nothing about (because Dorico requires a long learning curve, given that its interface and logic are very different from those of Finale).
In the meantime, it would be wiser to continue with the software we already know.
We’ll see in the future. But the latest communications from MakeMusic in September 2024 tell that Finale activation/deactivation would be assured without any time limit. So there’s no need to panic.
There’s no need to panic, no, and certainly any big projects should be finished in Finale. However, I would be surprised if the activation server was still up in 2028. The more new scores people make in Finale now, they’re just giving themselves more files to potentially have to convert later.
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Since I can’t read the future in the coffee grounds, I’ll refrain from making any predictions.
Let time take its course, and we’ll see what happens finalement (!)
There need be no panic; but there should be no complacency either. If you haven’t got a strategy for what to do when Finale stops working for you, then you can expect to lose everything.
It could be a hardware failure, or a future OS incompatibility, or some issue with VM software – or all of those.
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That’s about the time frame I’m expecting too. In the original announcement they only gave 1 year! They only changed that due to the freak out that followed, but I assume they want to get any Finale stuff off the books as soon as they can. Yes, they said the activation server will continue “indefinitely,” but that’s not really going to be the case. They are going to cease activations as soon as they can without the pushback affecting their other products.
I have over 14,000 Finale files, but I’ve already converted all of them to XML, and most of them to PDF, plus have an old laptop offline with Finale installed and a copy of all those files. It will have to do.
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Personally, I’m not concerned because, as you know, I don’t use Finale. 
Concerning hardware failure, it will be possible to reinstall Finale without any problem, since the software is downloaded in a dmg folder ; unless you haven’t backed it up beforehand, which is always very unwise.
MacOs incompatibility is a false problem.
I have in home and old G4 running on Tiger, and another PowerMac 8600 running on System 9.1 ; both work like clocks. (N.B, my home is a Macintosh Museum).
All you need to do is keep a machine that can run Finale 27… and that’s exactly what the die-hard Finalistes I’ve met have told me.
Reinstalling it after hardware failure isn’t the problem. Activating it is, if the activation server is no longer running when this happens.
Picture this. It’s 2030. You’re running an old computer from 2020, with your copy of Finale 27. Suddenly, and without warning, something on the board burns out.
You can’t just buy a new computer from the shop, because Finale 27 doesn’t work on MacOS Pico Boulevard. Nor Windows 12. (And yes, we’re likely to see ‘red lines’ of backward compatibility in future Windows versions.)
You could buy another ‘vintage’ computer from eBay (and who knows how long that will last); but you can’t authorize your new installation of Finale, because MM turned the servers off when no one was looking.
You might have already made a Virtual Machine image of Finale, fully authorized on a compatible OS. But guess what? Old VM images can be incompatible with new versions of the host software.
To sum up: you cannot guarantee that Finale will keep working. At best, you’ll have to spend more time doing tech-work, to keep it going – like a classic car that needs a week of maintenance for every Sunday drive.
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Yeah, the worst case scenario (and what I think is going to end up happening) is that they won’t be able to authorize Finale on the replacement computer and will only be able to use it for 30 days as a trial. To go beyond that, they would have to reformat the computer and set it up again and get another 30 days out of it, then reformat again and get another 30 days out of it, and keep doing that until the end of time.
Yes, yes. But you forget that in 2030, there will be no Earth at all. Totally burned !
So… Hakuna Matata. 
NB : When you buy a copy of Finale, you receive a personal code that allows you to install the software on any machine without needing a connection to any server.
This is handy when you need to reinstall the software, for one reason or another, in a region where there is no internet (in France, this is still often the case).
…not to mention how Dorico will be in 2030 
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Yes, I’ve experienced this sort of thing with the Adobe suite, Indesign and the old Pagemaker. Complications on top of complications. It was never-ending. Since then, whenever there’s a sign of obsolescence, I take precautions.
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