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Moog sells its business to InMusic

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Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#171

Post by pclmulqdq »

maxwell wrote: post #158
sowbug wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation might seem "extremely straightforward" to you, but it is an expensive and time-consuming kind of legal dispute, because it requires discovery of years of business records, expert witnesses in forensic accounting, and likely a trial to establish whose interpretation of key contract terms is the controlling one. That means years and at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal work, at the end of wh…

Any ideas on potential ways to avoid this kind of outcome when going into a royalty deal in the first place?

Have a really good lawyer who anticipates this sort of dispute. I would bet that the contract was written in a kind of "tricky" way that didn't make it clear exactly when the royalties applied.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#172

Post by underlipton »

dylan604 wrote: post #106
arethuza wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they use the "Hollywood Accounting" trick of promising payments based on profits then arranging things so that no profits are actually made?

I know this is the saying, but why is Hollywood given the dubious honors? Wouldn't it be just as accurate to say Business Accounting?

https://twitter.com/ed_solomon/status/1669178741342326784

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#173

Post by reddit_refugee3 »

maxwell wrote: post #158
sowbug wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation might seem "extremely straightforward" to you, but it is an expensive and time-consuming kind of legal dispute, because it requires discovery of years of business records, expert witnesses in forensic accounting, and likely a trial to establish whose interpretation of key contract terms is the controlling one. That means years and at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal work, at the end of wh…

Any ideas on potential ways to avoid this kind of outcome when going into a royalty deal in the first place?

I think the artist (unless they're like Radiohead or Taylor Swift or something) is always going to be at a massive disadvantage in any negotiation with a label (massive corporation).

This is just the nature of capitalism. The more capital you have, the more leverage you have.

The people who actually create the product are always at a disadvantage compared to those who own the means of that production.

You can try pooling resources together to negotiate collectively (unions), but without government intervention to put a thumb on the scale to try to even the playing field for unions vs corporations, even that would usually end poorly for the people who produce the actual product (see: union busting, the Pinkertons, etc.). Historically, they may actually even straight up just kill you for trying.

Capital also equals political power (even moreso since Citizens United), and corporations use that power to do everything they can to prevent that balance from tipping any direction but theirs.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#175

Post by dryrun »

midoridensha wrote: post #37
notmypenguin wrote: post #14

It’s sad how the entire music industry of actual innovators gets scooped up by conglomerates like InMusic. What is worse, however, is the blatant rip-off business plan of Behringer. They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths. Wanna know why Behringers product line exclusively features other peoples designs that have…

It's sad how some people think companies should have perpetual monopolies on things that were patented 50+ years ago.

What about stuff from two years ago?

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#176

Post by kazinator »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #34
iamben wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple of relevant PG essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/mean.html http://www.paulgraham.com/safe.html

Is that his essay that talks about how lisp knowledge can save future 9/11 attacks from happening? That’s a favorite of mine. Written right after the attacks. But I wonder why he delisted it while still hosting the essay to make it hard to find but still accessible

You are almost certainly referring to this:

https://www.paulgraham.com/hijack.html

Paul Graham compares the hijacking of an airplane to a buffer overflow attack.

He doesn't claim that tools for writing more secure computer programs could prevent terrorists from hijacking a plane.

He proposes the idea that some similar reasoning can be applied to preventing hijackings. It's not enough to monitor who gets on the airplane carrying what, but to separate the cockpit space from the passenger space.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#177

Post by jb1991 »

bzzzt wrote: post #73
jb1991 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> laying out the knobs in similar order? I mean, it's File-Edit-View and Cut-Copy-Paste, and laid out like the 6 strings of a guitar... This is a bit condescending. There’s much more nuance, variation, experimentation in synthesizer interfaces then what your comment suggests.

Of course there's variation, but most analog-style synthesizers still use the same basic oscillator waveforms (sawtooth, sine, triangle, square), some ADSR envelope variant and some LFO's.

> most analog-style synthesizers still use the same basic oscillator waveforms (sawtooth, sine, triangle, square), some ADSR envelope variant and some LFO's.

We are basically talking about the user interface, not the underlying synthesis engine/implementation. There is quite a bit of variety among synth interfaces that otherwise follow the standard subtractive synth mechanism of producing sound.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#178

Post by shams93 »

sireat wrote: post #49
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.

Gibson took over an audio startup a relative of mine had co-founded. Gibson offered extremely promising terms - funding, keep creative freedom, just deliver cool products. The startup delivered the products and met the goals -just in time for Gibson to go bankrupt. Inside Gibson there was endless corporate infighting. - an executive that was championing the acquisition of the startup was fired - the support was basic…

Yup there's another example of what I think of as the "hedge fund" approach. Sweetwater started as a neighborhood music store, now its owned by a hedge fund, guys who may not even like music. Bob Moog and Roger Linn loved music and it showed in their product. But just like these other examples this isn't the end of the Moog sound, especially since they also now own all the moog software synthesis products you can expect moog to land into the akai mpc line.

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#179

Post by wahnfrieden »

kazinator wrote: post #176
wahnfrieden wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that his essay that talks about how lisp knowledge can save future 9/11 attacks from happening? That’s a favorite of mine. Written right after the attacks. But I wonder why he delisted it while still hosting the essay to make it hard to find but still accessible

You are almost certainly referring to this: https://www.paulgraham.com/hijack.html Paul Graham compares the hijacking of an airplane to a buffer overflow attack. He doesn't claim that tools for writing more secure computer programs could prevent terrorists from hijacking a plane. He proposes the idea that some similar reasoning can be applied to preventing hijackings. It's not enough to monitor who gets on the airpla…

I know, that’s what I said his essay was about: Lisp knowledge would have prevented 9/11 and can prevent future hijacking attacks. Thanks for providing additional details - it's a treat to re-read his thoughts on 9/11

Re: Moog sells its business to InMusic

#180

Post by elihu »

glimshe wrote: post #162
an-unknown wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are overestimating the difficulty of producing something. Start building stuff as a hobby, and decide that you want to build it as efficiently as possible because you are lazy. You'll quickly realize that building synthesizers and in particular Eurorack modules is easy and cheap if this is what you're focusing on. What this means: with a Eurorack module, you don't need a case or power supply, since that's…

I will guess that you've never sold electronics at scale, with box, manual, per-country regulatory rules, customs, warranty, inventory etc. It's great that you have produced this small little module, but this is very far from what Behringer is doing. It's like comparing a personal Github repo with commercial software.

That's true that it's hard to run a profitable business doing this, but I think you're missing the point. If a person's goal isn't to earn a living but just have a hobby that financially breaks even selling kits on Tindie or whatever, the costs are surprisingly low.

Also,there's a lot of very good software used by many people that came from some person's personal github account. Hobbyist can and do compete favorably with commercial software all the time, but of course it's not as easy to make a living that way than it is to just put something out there that's useful.

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