It’s mostly just one product.
1 Like
Native Instruments entering Insolvency earlier this year might have something to do with it, especially if BorisFX started the acquisition deal with “we’ll pay your debts in exchange of owning your company.”
It always seemed to me that if you were going to use the NI synths, you pretty much needed to buy in to their heyboard hardware at teh same time, because that’s where half the value came. That is to say, their big claim to fame was that you could create spontaneously by meandering around pulling up sounds and previeing them entirely from teh keyboard without having to interact directly with the DAW for the most part. I could see merit in that if I were doing a lot of composition within the DAW, but it looked like way too much trouble for a person who wasn’t going to compose sounscapes daily.
All of the above maybe completely off the mark because I never bought into that. These are just the impressions I had from all of their ads and videos.
If I understand, NI acquired Izotope a couple of years ago. They halfway integrated the two companies, but then NI went into bankruptcy. I think Boris bought only the Izotope part.
InMusic “bought” what remained of Native Instruments. I don’t see the terms posted publicly. There was about $300M of debt. Some of that might have been absorbed by Boris, but most was probably discharged in BK, so I doubt that InMusic paid much.
Well, I’ve never had their hardware. My main controller is a Roland A-800PRO. I also use a Roland A-88 controller for piano and an Akai EWI-USB for winds. But I’ve long been used to doing things on the computer, versus on dedicated hardware.
I pretty much do traditional songs, where I’ve written the song and performed it live long before I get around to recording. There have been a few exceptions, here and there, where there is a deadline for a write-record-submit opportunity. Even there, though, I’m not generally composing in the DAW. But I write songs (i.e. with lyrics) for the most part.
They definitely seem to be going in a much more electronic music, loop-based/sound-based composition direction in terms of what’s been added to their KOMPLETE series in recent years.
I think it was actually that a private equity group bought NI, iZotope, and Plugin Alliance, and did some level of integration (at least using the Native ID login for iZotope and NI, though not for PA), and using NI as the most recognizable “umbrella”, if you will. Private equity is generally in it for the money, not the “vision”, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where the “customer disloyalty” programs came into play.
Yes, this is correct, and it makes some sense, especially with RX and the potential applicability of it to video post-production. But they also apparently bought Vegas, Samplitude (DAW), Sound Forge (audio editor), and maybe a few other things from MAGIX. I’m not quite sure how all that fits together, unless maybe as a potential competitor to Adobe and Avid.
As for InMusic, check out their Wikipedia page:
I’d never even heard of them before a Cubase freebies voucher thing from a year or two back, but they own a bunch of formerly standalone music brands like Akai, Alesis, M-Audio (formerly part of Avid), and Moog. They apparently have some focus on the DJ side of things, which makes the NI interest seem like a fit with NI’s recent directions.
They didn’t go bankrupt at all. They entered preliminary insolvency, which is just a state where a company is not capable of paying their debts. Bankrupcty is a legal result of insolvency not being solved. Getting bought by inMusic was the solution for their insolvency. BorisFX bought iZotope from inMusic, not Native Instruments.
Yep. And another scenario is to buy a cash cow. Even if the cow isn’t giving much milk, if you get it cheap enough, it can work, plus you inherit the customer records, which are valuable.
So the possibilities are: cash cow (no development), eliminate competition (no development or support), maintain product and try for synergies, maintain product but with a different business model (i.e. subscription) …
The one thing that is very unlikely is that the new owner will carry on the way the users had hoped. But that did happen with Steinberg’s acquisition by Yamaha.
That may be a terminology difference, In the US, we have a “chapter 7” (liquidation) and “chapter 11” (reorganization). It is all “bankruptcy” in our terminology. After all, even in Ch11, the creditors and shareholders usually get a bad haircut. and many of them end up Ch7 anyway.
Insolvency is a state. Liquidation and Bankrupcty are potential consequences of said state if not solved.
In the US, that entire process is referred to as bankruptcy, and is overseen by special bankruptcy courts, regardless chapter 7 or 11. It may be different in Germany or elsewhere.
Why not just agree to subsume it all under “financial issues”?
Insolvency is not the same thing as Bankruptcy in any court of law. Insolvency is a financial state, not a legal status. While insolvency might result in Bankruptcy, they’re not equivalent nor interchangeable term-wise.