@benwiggy hello,
You got me wrong. I’m not suggesting anything like this. No doubt Daniel is an artist in his area of working. But he is responsible for the marketing only for a single product.
There are other marketing managers who are responsible for the whole strategies of the both Steinberg and Yamaha. They are the one who are taking the major decisions, not the product managers.
So, in my post I had in mind the chief marketing managers of Steinberg and Yamaha, not Daniel.
And seems that you didn’t get to the point… The development of Dorico will continue in the right direction as it is at the moment. The scores will look better and better with every release.
If it becomes free this won’t change the quality of the product.
No one will stop you to do whatever you would like with Dorico. Even you may have a platform where you can sell your works easily and to establish more contacts with people around the Globe.
Yes, there would be good and bad scores… no one pushes you to buy something if you don’t like it.
Make it better and sell it.
@PjotrB hello,
Well, yes. In this case I suggest just a different funding method. The software itself to be completely free of charge and the income to come from:
User’s donations (non-obligatory)
Musical institution donations (obligatory, but acceptable amount)
And this will also open the doors for the other paid Steinberg products to be more widely adopted in these institutions which will bring more money for the company.
Commissions for sold music on a platform
Advertising profiles and scores on the music selling platform
Increased sales of Cubase and Nuendo, once there is a good integration between
Dorico and the two DAWs.
Surely if Dorico becomes free it will increase it’s market share more than 10 times in a very short period.
Just someone at Steinberg should conduct researches how these ideas will be accepted and to calculate the eventual profits from such strategy. After all ideas like these ones need not only personal opinion but researches and mathematical calculations.
Surveys should be launched amongst the musician community, the publishing business… etc.
Just the ideas should be structured in a better way and of course according to the copyright laws, in order everything to be completely legal.
This of course isn’t Daniel’s responsibility. But at least someone of the team could share this topic to the right people in Steinberg.
It’s a lot easier to have ideas that risk other people’s money. It allows a certain freedom and optimism that the companies tasked with implementing these ideas and risking their capital (and even existence) do not enjoy.
There are enough methods everything to be calculated, even the risk. And in there is no advancement in the World without risking something. The risk always exists.
But something could be done this risk to be calculated.
I don’t think the risk is as big as you are thinking…
This model isn’t something new and it works. And of course it could be put on test. If it doesn’t work well, they could always return to the previous state. If there are loses at all they won’t be painful for Steinber/Yamaha.
What makes you think that the clever people at Steinberg haven’t thought through everything that you’re suggesting, already?
What’s your experience in open source software? What’s your knowledge of Steinberg’s balance sheet, let alone their intentions? What do you know about Bandlab or Muse Group that the rest of us don’t know? Or is this all uninformed supposition?
If Steinberg/Yamaha ever do anything along the lines you’ve laid out here, I have no doubt that it’ll be because they’ve weighed up the pros and cons with as much knowledge - external and internal - as they can possibly gather, not because one customer has suggested they should do so.
About the open source I have enough experience with operating systems like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Debian and Ubuntu Linux. Probably 6 - 7 years of my life were dedicated to these platforms and system administration. I can say that they far more profitable for their developers that the people think. And proved to be more stable and secure than paid Windows Server. Anyway… this is long story…
I don’t know if someone at Steinberg already thought about about these ideas. I don’t know much about BandLab and Muse Group, but they seem to be successful, since BandLab were able to acquire Cakewalk and Muse Group - Staffpad. These companies have many other products they offer.
As I mentioned in the topic - “Some Thoughts…”. Of course they need research and calculation in order to be seen how profitable they could be.
For sure the chief marketing managers at Steinberg and Yamaha could do all the needed things in order to check. If they already did such researches, well would be nice if they could share something. And also the time changes, in the past such ideas may not be enough profitable, but nowadays they could be far more profitable. Especially after the Covid situation when most of the trading went online and many people started to work from home.
Daniel kept his response vague and polite, yet implicating this discussion is pointless. @Thurisaz, do you really expect any Steinberg employee to discuss long-term marketing strategies on a public forum?
I think Dorico is the perfect business model as said above; you download it, try it out, and then buy it. Dorico is used by professional composers and engravers who work to a very high standard and are prepared to pay for it. I don’t want to make assuptions but unless the OP has to work to the highest professional standards this discussion is irrelevant in my opinion.
And I can do it for free as I also have Cubase and Ableton but they do not do what I want, need, nor what is expected of me. I am not interest in clouds and websites, I have my own website and my own cloud account - most professionals I know are the same.
Certainly Linux is largely free and has many volunteer programmers so I am not unaware of such things.
As the tech adage says, if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product.
It’s really time we wrap this goofy thread up. I’ll probably get lambasted for this, but here goes…
Donationware rarely supports developers. Even indie developers eventually fold and they are only asking for enough donations to support a single person. People do not donate adequately. I can’t count how many programs I’ve used in the past (many of which I’ve donated to) that have either folded completely or were forced to start charging a mandatory fee because people were not adequately supporting the developer.
Also, what constitutes a “reasonable” amount to charge? We can disagree on that allllllll day long. The proof is in the pudding: all the threads that inevitably pop up every time there is a new version where half the people think the upgrade price is reasonable and the other half are outraged. It’s not even worth the time to ponder it.
Many composers don’t sell their products through the various digital sheet music companies right now because their commission fees are exorbitant. I am currently going through the trouble of making my own website for this very reason.
Many composers don’t have two pennies to rub together to pay for advertising on a platform full of other musicians also seeking to have their works discovered. I doubt very many would pay $30 a month for advertising when oodles of people have publicly stated that they would never pay that in a subscription fee for Dorico itself.
Why go through the trouble of making Dorico set up a whole ecosystem when there are other companies that have already done all of this and are far-more advanced along this route as is? Do we really stand to gain anything by Dorico trying to compete with Nkoda rather than developing Dorico itself?
Lastly, you can’t pin Dorico’s financial success on the sales of other programs. What makes Dorico the special program that gets to be free rather than Nuendo or Cubase? Why not have Dorico sales help support one of those programs on the free model?
