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Moog sells its business to InMusic

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Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#61

Post by bemusedthrow75 »

glimshe wrote: post #50
notmypenguin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s absolutely unethical when your obvious goal is to loss-lead everyone else into either bankruptcy or selling out. I am a consumer of music gear. Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative. They poison the well! Uli Behringer is also the quintessential slimy shady businessman, look it up. Behringer is bad…

Is Behringer loss-leading? They have invested almost nothing in research and development for their little synths as they use long expired designs that require technology developed decades ago (dirt cheap). As a part time musician, my take is the opposite of yours. Behringer made instruments that were once owned by a small, non-inclusive wealthy elite (relatively speaking) available to everyone in rich and poor countr…

And if Behringer can do it to the competition -- using their expired patents and making a still-competitive product -- then someone else can do it to Behringer.*

This is the preferred outcome of the patent system! Someone got to make a design for 25 years with the protection of the system, and now everyone can. And if you don't innovate, you don't get the protection.

* Edit: including the very firms Behringer is cloning, after all.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#62

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

elihu wrote: post #9
busterarm wrote: post #6

Hardware synths, in particular the varieties that Moog makes, are at peak relevance again and who knows if that will remain the case. The brand was certainly sucking wind for a good 30 years of its history previously. Cashing out that equity now is a shrewd move...especially as consumer spending has gone to who knows where.

I don't think hardware analogy synthesizers are going anywhere anytime soon. Moog is probably facing a lot of competition though, and they aren't very active in the Eurorack modular space where a lot of the interesting new stuff is happening. (In particular, a lot of their popular synths, including recently released ones, are being cloned by Behringer.) It would be interesting to know if they were doing great but sol…

I suspect Moog saturated their own market. There are only so many people who want to pay $5000 for a new Minimoog, and most of them already had a reissue. Even fewer who want to pay $10k for an analog poly with mixed reviews and software issues.

We'll see what happens next. Given IM's history I would guess the Moog brand will be stuck on some generic mediocre products, and most of the US workers will be let go.

But I'd love to be proven wrong.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#63

Post by Applejinx »

ubercow13 wrote: post #56
notmypenguin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s absolutely unethical when your obvious goal is to loss-lead everyone else into either bankruptcy or selling out. I am a consumer of music gear. Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative. They poison the well! Uli Behringer is also the quintessential slimy shady businessman, look it up. Behringer is bad…

Why do you say they are loss leading? They presumably are not. Instead they are reasonably pricing out-of-patent hardware designs which the original manufacturers are apparently vastly overcharging for decades after they have recouped their R&D costs. If anything this should drive innovation not stifle it. Other hardware manufacturers are now required to innovate and actually spend on R&D to sell hardware at higher p…

You're not understanding economies of scale.

Small businesses can't get parts at nearly the cost of a Behringer, because small businesses can't bankroll a Chinese city dedicated to making your stuff (with or without slave labor, labor costs are likewise unapproachable by small businesses)

Behringer are explicitly trying to get people to show the attitude you show, implying that small instrument and effect creators are ripping people off by not pricing their stuff like a titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities and stockpiles parts by the millions. You cannot get the economies of scale Behringer gets.

And yeah they have a Chinese attitude toward property. I'm in the process of getting a reverb unit, a pricey one with some pretty fancy DAC hardware built in, which was so explicitly ripped off by Behringer that the clone had to be yanked from the market. You don't hear about the times they're busted because they would rather not have that be known: the publically obvious stuff is the stuff where there's not a lot of point in fighting it (see, titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities).

You are wrong that Behringer's business model drives innovation; it explicitly makes it impossible to operate in any way other than as an open source/sharing-economy model that undercuts them as they can't literally undercut 'free'. In so doing, you have to accept poverty. That's the only way to compete with what they are. That, or try to make your money between creating a thing, having it be successful, and having them knock it off for pennies on the dollar in costs.

Did you say 'vastly overcharging'? ;)

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#64

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

glimshe wrote: post #50
notmypenguin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s absolutely unethical when your obvious goal is to loss-lead everyone else into either bankruptcy or selling out. I am a consumer of music gear. Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative. They poison the well! Uli Behringer is also the quintessential slimy shady businessman, look it up. Behringer is bad…

Is Behringer loss-leading? They have invested almost nothing in research and development for their little synths as they use long expired designs that require technology developed decades ago (dirt cheap). As a part time musician, my take is the opposite of yours. Behringer made instruments that were once owned by a small, non-inclusive wealthy elite (relatively speaking) available to everyone in rich and poor countr…

They absolutely have invested in R&D. The clones are not trivial component-for-component copies. A lot of old parts aren't available any more and the circuits have to be rebuilt around what's available today. They've added MIDI and USB features. They built their own chip division to resurrect the chips of the 80s. They built products like the DeepMind which is Juno-ish but not really a clone.

What they did do was nuke the Veblen Good aspect of synth collecting. High-end vintage collectables are far more likely to be bought by doctors, lawyers, and other dabblers than by full-time creatives.

There's still some of that happening, and always will be. But it's a much wider market now and more people can get the technology - even if it's just for dabbling - than before.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#65

Post by ubercow13 »

Applejinx wrote: post #63
ubercow13 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say they are loss leading? They presumably are not. Instead they are reasonably pricing out-of-patent hardware designs which the original manufacturers are apparently vastly overcharging for decades after they have recouped their R&D costs. If anything this should drive innovation not stifle it. Other hardware manufacturers are now required to innovate and actually spend on R&D to sell hardware at higher p…

You're not understanding economies of scale. Small businesses can't get parts at nearly the cost of a Behringer, because small businesses can't bankroll a Chinese city dedicated to making your stuff (with or without slave labor, labor costs are likewise unapproachable by small businesses) Behringer are explicitly trying to get people to show the attitude you show, implying that small instrument and effect creators ar…

I wasn't saying all of Behringer's business practices are good. But specifically cloning out-of-patent designs from the 80s is exactly what should be done by such a large mass-producer, those components should be commoditised!

Cloning new designs is obviously worse and maybe the patent system doesn't provide the desired protection in those cases.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#66

Post by stuaxo »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #23
scns wrote: post #2

> inMusic isn't free from controversy. Formed in 2012 by Jack O'Donnell, a former vice-president at DJ equipment brand Stanton > Roger Linn, who made many ground-breaking drum machines in the '80s before creating the MPC 60 for Akai, has accused O'Donnell of failing to pay him royalties after acquiring Akai, repeatedly calling him unscrupulous and a "bastard" in interviews. Is it absolutely necessary to fuck people o…

Whether or not it's necessary, it's common in the music production business. There are several egregious examples, Gibson Guitar being perhaps the best known.

Watched an interview with the rapper DoseOne the other day, he said he still makes records but doesn't engage with the music industry (promoting, gigs etc) as there is too much bullshit, instead he does work in the games industry and cites that as much more sane.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#67

Post by Applejinx »

glimshe wrote: post #54
elihu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be funny if there was a community effort to make a schematic of the Neutron or Proton, design a board, and have it manufactured at JLCPCB or wherever. Sell it as a kit with all the SMD components already populated, all you have to do is solder in the through-hole jacks and pots and whatever. Use a Eurorack module form factor so it doesn't need an enclosure. Sell it at cost, which would probably be way less t…

I think you are underestimating the difficulty of producing something. Just check what happens with 90% of kickstarters that need to produce stuff. And I know what I'm talking about because I thought about doing something like what you propose for a while, and I concluded that I'd never be able to beat Behringer. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just not easy and Behringer has a lot of merit in being efficient at…

You can't make a business doing that, quite correct.

If there is any other merit to what you're looking to do, and you can float the cost, you can make a thing happen and see if it's too niche for Behringer: if it's that popular, you'll get a knock-off for pennies on the dollar and your best bet is to position yourself as the original, and accept your market got ate.

I don't think Moog is ONLY selling out because its Minimoog got cloned by the Behringer D, but I've owned a Behringer D and soundwise it wasn't half bad: many decisions made were in the service of the thing actually sounding good, at least in the revision I had. I own a Moog Sub Phatty and swapped out the side panels for aftermarket wood ones, because it had the 'sticky plastic' issue, and the octave switch for octave 1 ain't working. The flagship Moog One synths have had some issues. This sort of thing is brutal on a small business… they're paying more for their parts and labor, but they'll run into the same issues that Behringer or any manufacturer will.

You won't out-Behringer Behringer. It's exactly the sort of T-Rex you don't want to battle directly. There is nothing stopping you from being a small mammal scurrying about making stuff. Come up with a business model that bootstraps and does what you need, and don't attempt to get capital that would demand a 10x return while knowing Behringer exists, as you can't have a 10x return at all, ever. You can probably still make stuff but you have to design the business, not just the product.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#68

Post by Sosh101 »

comboy wrote: post #24
Sosh101 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Behringer did release their own "Neutron" (and soon "Proton"), but I generally agree with your points. Also they've cloned Moog gear that's <10 years old.

I can blindly distinguish Moog from Behringer with compressed youtube audio and I don't even have good ears (at least for one instrument I did that experiment on). It's just a signal, I'm sure it can be copied perfectly but Moog still seems to be doing wrooms like no other.

> I can blindly distinguish distinguish Moog from Behringer with compressed youtube audio

Which Moog/Behringer combo was it? In the case of DFAM/Edge the filters are different (Ladder vs. something more standard)

> It's just a signal

I don't think that's fair. Analogue stuff goes through a signal path with so many different components where even minuscule differences at any point could lead to quite different results at the end.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#69

Post by bemusedthrow75 »

Applejinx wrote: post #63
ubercow13 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say they are loss leading? They presumably are not. Instead they are reasonably pricing out-of-patent hardware designs which the original manufacturers are apparently vastly overcharging for decades after they have recouped their R&D costs. If anything this should drive innovation not stifle it. Other hardware manufacturers are now required to innovate and actually spend on R&D to sell hardware at higher p…

You're not understanding economies of scale. Small businesses can't get parts at nearly the cost of a Behringer, because small businesses can't bankroll a Chinese city dedicated to making your stuff (with or without slave labor, labor costs are likewise unapproachable by small businesses) Behringer are explicitly trying to get people to show the attitude you show, implying that small instrument and effect creators ar…

Exploiting economies of scale is not loss-leading, though.

It's a tough lesson, for sure, and it repeats all across industry, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth, but making things for less profit is not making a loss. And nor is making things in China.

I'm sure Korg, Moog, Akai etc., all need to step up on pushing for greater respect for copyrights and patents in China. As do Arca-Swiss and RRS in the photography world. (e.g. there is a single Leofoto product that is not available for sale in Europe because Arca-Swiss had some success in demonstrating it is a close copy; Leofoto have moved on to other more innovative designs)

And here is an unfortunate lesson: if you continue to sell a product for the same price as you could charge before your patent expired, after it expires, then yeah. You are almost certainly overcharging, even if you don't know it yet.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#70

Post by pschuegr »

stuaxo wrote: post #66
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not it's necessary, it's common in the music production business. There are several egregious examples, Gibson Guitar being perhaps the best known.

Watched an interview with the rapper DoseOne the other day, he said he still makes records but doesn't engage with the music industry (promoting, gigs etc) as there is too much bullshit, instead he does work in the games industry and cites that as much more sane.

Well that's saying something when the games industry is more sane.
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