That seems to be the default strategy, as if Steinberg prefers to create completely independent, unconnected silos for Dorico, Cubase, Wavelab, Spectralayers, Cubasis etc. INTENTIONALLY, so as to enable them to sell off properties individually.
I am not saying this is, in fact, the Steinberg strategy. I think it would be a very foolish strategy. But that is how it appears, in the absence of any clearly stated strategy.
My opinion is that the superior strategy is “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” or in other words, “sell the entire Steinberg ecosystem rather than a random collection of disconnected point products.”
But I am not a Steinberg executive, board member, shareholder or anything else, so my opinion really doesn’t matter much.
I’m genuinely struggling to see how “bringing Hal Leonard’s catalog to the massive audience of Muse Group” - given that almost all that audience are working with free software and are internet-savvy to the point where if they wanted to, they could download most of it for free anyway - is going to work. Financially.
I appreciate some think that this is a wake-up call for Steinberg but personally, I disagree. To my eyes it seems fraught with risk and likely to lead to all manner of compromises. As far as Dorico goes, the safer, the more strategically sound, position is the one they’re already occupying. Leading the field on quality and improving the product they already have.
I missed this and it confuses me a little but it reinforces a thought I had a few hours ago and that was maybe this is simply a move to keep both companies afloat? Maybe the strategy is survival rather than some ground-breaking business model or idea?
Side note: Didn’t realize Muse Group owns Audacity.
I don’t think the access to the Hal Leonard’s Library will be for free to the MuseScore customers. As you already know MuseScore.com isn’t free service.
Probably they should pay for the digital copies.
Actually no one officially made a statement about any free access to the HL library. How do you came to that conclusion?!
At the risk of being pedantic, Audacity is open source, so nobody “owns” it. Muse owns the trademark and are acting as the managers of the open source development. I have no idea how many of the “more than 200” employees are primarily on Audacity. There have been several releases since Muse took stewardship of the project, and they are mostly in the area of VST support, allowing for some non-destructive edits, more like a real DAW.
I assume their long-term goal is to develop proprietary extensions that will take Audacity customers to subscription services.
I also get some crashes on Windows if I don’t have exactly the right combination of input and output devices and settings. I have to use one setting to capture sound from my PC’s sound card and a different setting if I want to do any editing. That’s pretty annoying.
@cparmerlee , this is exactly what I’m talking about all the time in this post!
It’s not about that “Steinberg must acquire some publishing company”. It’s about the Company’s marketing strategy, which is one of the weakest points.
We have different behavior of the teams on the forum. For example:
Amazingly adequate and helpful Dorico Team. They are always here helping and cooperating with the users.
On the other side the team behind Cubase is probably living in a parallel universe where everything is fine and Cubase is the perfect product. You can hardly get any feedback from them on feature request, or software issue.
Complete different software building strategies. For example:
Dorico balances very well between the users and business needs and the teams plans. Not an easy task, but the guys really know how to deal with all those requirements.
Cubase is far away from called balanced. The team’s attention is mainly on “improvements” no one asked for, instead on the performance improvements most requested features… There are many important features that weren’t implemented for years, and still they are missing. Cubase / Nuendo is far behind Pro Tools when it comes to Audio Editing. I’m even wondering if there is an agreement between the companies, that Cubase / Nuendo should always be behind.
The teams’ behavior on the forum must be equal, the software building strategy, as well. And all they should follow the model established by the Dorico team!
There should be a mandatory frames, established by the best team, or the head of the company, in which the team will have some degree of freedom.
What makes the Legion victorious? Every unit from the Contubernium all the way through the Centurias and the Cohorts follow the unit rules and the clear orders given by the Legatus and all they are functioning as a single machine.
Personally I don’t see Steinberg as the victorious legion I’ve described above…
I see only one well prepared cohort, behind Dorico, which strictly does it’s duties.
There should be a good balance between discipline and freedom in a company like Steinberg. The creativity needs freedom, but the success needs a serious discipline.
Of course Steinberg as DAW and Notation software developer, should also become more attractive to the users by providing them a complete ecosystem (from scoring, to selling sheets and audio). The acquisition of a publishing company isn’t a mandatory thing, they could just collaborate with a major one in order to provide legit contracts and copyright, and possibly paid access to it’s digital library.
As I already said, the publishing houses have the needed infrastructure - license and copyright agreements, and library. I suppose @dan_kreider wouldn’t mind if Steinberg decide to acquire Scorico.Net , as it’s already very well designed platform that’s needs some more details to be added in order to become fully functional commercial platform where both Steinberg and the publishing house’s infrastructure could meet in order to offer everything needed to authors and the clients.
From the major market players Muse Group and MakeMusic did this important step… Steinberg and AVID (which was acquired due to bad marketing strategy) didn’t, yet. About AVID, I’m not sure if STG is interested to make such serious decisions and investments, or they just saving AVID until it’s acquired by another company?!
The topic is about that we care about the future of Steinberg as customers. To share some thoughts and ideas what is important for us in this dynamically changing market.
The thread is here because Dorico is the piece of software that requires the most the company to move forward and bring something more. The DAWs are far more flexible and they are widely for recording, mixing and mastering and already there are many platforms where audio files could be sold by the composers. The copyright in the audio world is a very simple thing, one doesn’t need even to sign with a copyright company, just because for the copyright of an audio the first media appearance matters. The situation with the scores is completely different and needs more care.
I hope Steinberg will move forward for the best of all of us, and the company!
I get the general feeling that Steinberg isn’t terribly interested in that. Perhaps that will change, but I thought I remembered Daniel saying that wasn’t something that was being explored back when Dan was proposing Scorico. There are many online services already though like Nkoda, Alexander Street, BabelScores, etc., so there might be collaboration, partnership, or outright acquisition opportunities too.
Another thing that’s a bit of a head scratcher to me is the apparent lack of synergy between the software side and the hardware side. The sheer number of available audio interfaces, both high and low end, kind of exploded during and post-COVID lockdown, yet I rarely hear Steinberg’s interfaces discussed. If you look at Sweetwater, select USB Audio Interfaces, and sort by Popular, Steinberg doesn’t have one in the top 100. Similar results at Vintage King, B&H, etc.
Perhaps this has been done and I’ve just missed it, but does Steinberg ever do hardware/software bundles with full programs, not just SE or Elements versions? Maybe as most Cubase or Dorico users will already have an interface, it might be a pointless marketing strategy, but it seems like it could bring more brand visibility to the hardware side.
Hi @FredGUnn and Merry Christmas!
I hope you are doing pretty well during the holidays!
You are pretty correct in your statement here. It seems that Steinberg isn’t interested enough to where the market is going… That’s why this topic is important.
Daniel is just a product manager and the big decisions about the overall marketing strategy of the company isn’t part of his obligations. He could only share our discussion with Mr. Clyde Sendke, who’s in charge about the big things at Steinberg. I read his interview posted in the second comment in this topic, and to me it doesn’t sound good, or optimistic… it even makes me question his competence for this position?!
I really hope I’m wrong in my perception about him!
Well… the hardware… and bundles of hardware and software…
You haven’t missed anything. The Steinberg interfaces and Yamaha’s hardware comes with Cubase AI, a limited version of Cubase.
The interesting fact is that Steinberg lost positions in the software and hardware bundling. Companies like Arturia, Native Instruments, M-Audio, Korg, Novation bundle their hardware with Ableton Live. Steinberg lost it’s positions in the bundles.
Many strategic decisions should be made in a short amount of time for the future of the company in order to become more effective and attractive. Steinberg should be an up to date company, not a dinosaur from the past…
We have now squarely veered from, “as a customer, I would love to see the company pursue/do/offer ______” to trying to tell the company the best way to run itself. Let’s please refrain from doing the latter. It is quite presumptuous and beyond the scope of competence of anyone here on the forum.
We do not know:
the internal workings of any of the associated companies
their finances
the details of their market research
internal professional goals
broader goals they may have that pertain to non-euro / American markets
And the list could go on and on. We just don’t need to tell Steinberg how to be Steinberg, or Yamaha how to be Yamaha.
Respectfully, Yamaha is a publicly traded company and we know a great deal about many of these points from their annual report.
For example, we know that the AV division, of which Steinberg is part, accounts for 23.7% of their operating profit. As far as I can see, parts of it have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels and recovery seems to be lagging behind that of musical instruments in part because of well-known supplier problems (semiconductors, etc) and forced shutdowns, while the music production sector (Nuendo, Cubase, Dorico and maybe some related equipment) grew significantly.
We also know that Yamaha openly admits their previous global management plan failed:
For 2022-25 plan period, Yamaha decided to double-down on their vision of becoming “An Indispensable Brilliantly Individual Company” (what on earth does that even mean, apart from silo models and semi-autonomous operation?):
In answer of the OP, it seems Yamaha does in fact have an ecosystem strategy that’s not altogether different from Muse Group in the sense of creating some kind of an “ecosystem” - except it’s one that’s tied to integration of existing strengths rather than getting into (new) publishing business:
The idea of Yamaha Music ID doesn’t exactly send shivers down my spine because it’s clearly something that helps them as a corporation (like Steinberg ID) and not me as a consumer. But, on the other hand, I see huge potential and value in “Easy production/presentation of music” and hope very much that means the long-discussed and vaguely promised integration of Cubase and Dorico will happen. Also, “True Sound” is mentioned as a strategy for AV division and perhaps this might mean more efforts in immersive and MIDI 2.0 in the music production space that might affect Dorico, but I’m doubtful. In any case, it’s an interesting and rich area because it can mean many things important to music makers.
They want to achieve 5 million new MusicID registrants in 3 years. Ultimate Guitar and MuseScore between them have 40 million users now, for context, and their ID system (subscriptions, basically, to paid courses and services) is the main driver of their revenue.
Yet, like most here, I also do not think Yamaha should be getting into music publishing. It’s a totally different animal because unlike Muse Group they actually produce physical AV equipment and instruments and operate factories and machinery and they do innovate in musical instruments and pianos. But I don’t agree that we should tell people to stop talking about Yamaha’s strengths or weaknesses or “muse” publicly on what they could be doing better. Who exactly is hurt from conversations like this?
EDIT: I also think Yamaha should be actively offering Dorico “xyz” with every purchase of a Yamaha musical instrument - which is a huge amount of sales. In pianos alone, Yamaha controls half of the world’s market. And by “actively offering” I mean promoting that as a bundle, sending reminders to install & activate, and integrating the guides to that version of Dorico into their current Yamaha music lessons system.
I also think this is a great idea! At least for band instruments, Yamaha does really make the best student instruments IMO. I’m not sure how many of these are ever purchased vs rented from a local store though. I would guess most beginning students rent. Their pro instruments are very, very good. I have a YAS-875 that’s a really great alto (although I prefer my Yanagisawa) and a YPC-62 picc too.
I have no idea where the market research lands with this, but I’d be curious if giving a voucher for Cubase or Dorico with any professional level Yamaha instrument would actually end up increasing revenue over time, as those musicians would then be on the path to purchasing regular upgrades if they used the software.
Yamaha could offer Dorico SE, but how owuld they put a download into a box with a physical instrument? I suppose a slip of paper with a web address would be simplest.
After purchasing a new instrument, when the user goes to the website to register it (purchase date, price, retailer, serial #, etc) they could automatically have a download available in their account, receive a digital voucher to redeem, etc. There obviously could be a physical voucher in the case along with any other documentation too, but doing it completely digital would allow them to run the promotion whenever they wanted.
Yamaha’s instrument line is very clearly separated by Student / Intermediate/ Professional models so there could even be different bundles based on instrument level. No idea if they have any interest in that at all, but it does seem like an opportunity for Yamaha to cross-promote the Steinberg brand and introduce users to Steinberg products. Those buying professional level instruments are likely going to have both DAW and notation needs nowadays anyway.
Boom. Performance matters. Customers vote with their wallets. Touchy feely make work in the cloak room but it means nothing when you have to post results.
