That’s awful, I got mine for $600 when it came out 
Prices usually flux with the currency conversion rates of the country of manufacture and the contry its for sale in…
1 Like
i got mine on ebay basically new the year it came out for 600 us dude, dont be afraid to look outside of retail
1 Like
I would never consider buying new…but now people are selling used for more than what it once cost new !!
Think I’ll hold off on Elektron products till I can find a fair deal. I wouldn’t pay more than $600 CDN for a Digitakt and Samples is not worth more than $300 max in my opinion ! Read comments in the YTube vidz…most agree, its way overpriced. Perfect Circuit did an awesome demo, but most others make Samples sound like a cheap ios app. Lots of enthusiasm turning knobs, bobbing heads and acting like its the hottest new piece of gear, but close your eyes and listen…quite underwhelming considering the cost !!
1 Like
I just recently bought a Digitakt before the price hike. I wonder if it has something to do with our dollar being shit. I don’t think you’re gonna see a Digitakt for less than $800 used at this point, and I’m in your area so I’ve always got an eye on Craigslist Elektron gear cause I’ve been contemplating an Octatrack. There’s actually a MachineDrum on there right now for $1200.
Thing is, we’re seeing the same price hike in GBP and EUR too. I don’t know what the price was in Swedish Krona, so can’t say whether it’s gone up there too, but it seems like this may be across the board, which makes me suspect it’s not related to exchange rates.
Again, thought, @hommes_doutant has said that this fluctuation happens every year, and so far nobody’s given any reason to doubt them.
Someone needs to call Alex Jones.
While we’re at it get David Ike on the phone too, this could be the lizard people!
Or it could just be that there’s no fucking sales on this month, you know, the month when no-one buys anything, so all the shops hike their prices up for a couple of weeks so they can sell them at the normal “sale price” in time for the “spring madness price event” sales Armageddon in March.
2 Likes
If you were a business, what would you do? Personally i’d make a clear divide between the tiers of price:features.
Digitakt was originally marketed as entry level Elektron. Now the Model series is being marketed as entry level Elektron. With DT now being ‘mid-level’. So either M:S needs to be significantly lower than DT, or DT needs to be significantly higher price than M:S…From a business angle it makes sense to first see how the latter approach works out…
With that in mind this seems less of a conspiracy than just an obvious, somewhat inevitable, pricing strategy from Elektron.
If this were a sensible pricing strategy, we’d see it from a lot of other businesses, but we rarely do (I can’t think of examples other than, perhaps, Apple).
It seems more reasonable to assume that, as with any product, they’ve made a balance between a good number of sales and a good profit margin. If they lose a significant number of sales at a higher price point, it won’t be worth the bump in profit-per-unit. If consumers observe a 100 spike in price, they’re likely to hold off buying, so sales are likely to take a hit.
If February is a cold month for sales, then stores are going to be relying on the need-to-buy consumers rather than the impulse buyers and the ones who can wait for a good deal, because both those groups aren’t making many purchases right now anyway. So it makes for a good short-term pricing strategy for the shops.
Simply, if the DT has been selling better than any other Elektron product at x pricepoint, it would make bad business sense to reduce those sales, let alone to do so by pushing people towards a cheaper product.
Guess time will tell.
Like in march, when prices go down on everything by about 10%.
Yeah possibly, but I haven’t noticed everything else in the DT price range going up £100 across all stores ahead of possible March reductions. Or other elektron gear having significant price rise ahead of March reductions. Haven’t really been paying attention though.
And a 10% March reduction wouldn’t null a £100 increase in any case?
Seems like from some there’s a reluctance to entertain the idea that this could just be a commonplace pricing strategy… No ‘conspiracy’, just standard business practises. Of course it could just be coincidence or a decision made by stores independently, like some are suggesting. But no one knows and this stuff is standard practise so I’m not sure where the ‘conspiracy’ sarcasm/ridicule is coming from…
So I asked a store and they replied with the following:
'I’m afraid as we got new stock in the purchasing price increased so we had to adjust our price accordingly!
So It’s very unlikely that the price would reduce i’m afraid.’
(for reference, that’s a UK-based store)
1 Like
Sounds like Elektron bumped the wholesale price up. I checked some online shops here and they probably still have older stock. They cost between 600 and 650 euro new.
Risky strategy possibly. No immediate problem but it seems like companies like Arturia and Korg are paying more and more attention to the features in the products of companies like Elektron. They’ve had plenty of time to do so now while ‘new feature’ progress has slowed down in past years…
Would be very interested to see what was in a new electribe sampler or Arturia digital groovbox…
On their own website it’s listed for 779 euro. Never seen it for that amount at any retailer. It’s usually around 625 on average.
wasn’t it €699 direct from elektron previously, or has it always been that price?
Their price has fluctuated as well. According to the Wayback Machine in 2017 the Digitakt was listed on their website for $679 and few months later (I think once OB became free) it was bumped to $759 which is still the price listed on the latest snapshot.
You can browse the snapshots of the Digitakt product page here.
Maybe new buyers are paying into an ongoing R&D that would lead to some old fashioned Elektron updates with new features.
1 Like