Do EM Gear Companies Talk to Each Other About Upcoming Releases?

The Lounge Other Gear
#21

I’ve dont think Ive ever known anyone refer to competitors as enemies, let alone more serious staff - frankly at best it sounds ‘childish’ and unprofessional. but sure, ymmv, but its not widespread.

as for OP, sure… companies are a collection of individuals and they talk all the time.

first hand, I know one of the aspect the manufactures love about Superbooth, is the opportunity to talk to others in the industry, so that can share their experiences…
ofc, you’ll only talk about ‘upcoming’ products with people you can trust… but its still useful/valuable to get feedback outside your own ‘bubble’

the smaller the company, the more this happens, because they can act as a small group of individuals , less ‘policy’ etc.

on the other hand, with bigger companies, you have more employees and contractors shifting around the industry, so there is always a certain amount of ‘cross pollination’

but none of this is EM specific , its true of every industry/sector.

btw: a good example of this, is in eurorack… the like of befaco these days are now manufacturing for other eurorack companies, to try to get some economies of scale on fabrication…

as for collaboration, e.g. trying to make things worth together with other companies products.
outside of agree standards, this is hard…
the issue is you create a dependancy, and thats not a good thing generally.

it does happen, but its rare, CLAP is a pretty good example , also Ableton Link, but they also demonstrate the danger… and took alot of care to highlight, that it was ‘open sourced’, so not being controlled by one party.
(hough even there, the danger is the original creator, always has an advantage/more power)

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#22

Don’t get me started on how many times I felt like I’m working in a mental institution or a kindergarten… but then again, I sometimes feel the same way just living in this world in general.

I’ve never experienced Superbooth or similar, but I’m excited to see it in action this year. For me it makes sense to collaborate.

#23

Superbooth is great, I decided to give it a miss this year, but because Ive been for last 6 years, needed a small break :wink:

yeah, I had to edit my post… to clarify this a bit.
collaboration / partnerships for a company are a double edge sword.
they create a dependancy, potentially with an unbalanced ‘power’ dynamic.

so outside of established standards, which are supposed to be ‘neutral’, its tricky to make work.

ofc, you’ll get some very small companies that’ll make a product that specific tied to another (usually big) company’s product, but thats a specific use-case.

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#24

Yeah this is well understood. Publicly traded companies probably have an even harder time achieving this.

Propellerheads and Line 6 issue with their FX come to mind. I need to re-read what happened, but from the top of my head I think the licensing expired, and since those two FX came bundled with Reason, they had to go to another vendor (Softube) to build replacement RE’s, and make it compatible with previous projects to some degree. It was quite bad specifically as it did not sound the same.

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#25

yeah, not sure about Propellerhead/Line 6.

but generally propellerhead/reason is an interesting use-case -
they originally went the route of having their own api for 3rd party devs.
this does make sense, you can have a really close ‘tie-in;’ with the host, if you make it specific, rather than use a generic api , llke VST, which limits options (a lot!)

but it creates a dependancy of those 3rd parties, and frankly, as devs, we are inundated with apis to use and support… so you target the ‘big ones’.
which is how VST came to dominate, as you supporte multiple daws with one api.

but even there, VST road has not been smooth, look at VST3 and the whole licensing issues around it. it took years to get wider adoption of vst3 over vst2.
(and we are seeing the same with midi 1.0 vs midi 2.0, and likely clap will have similar issues)

ofc, you could just take Apple’s route, and be dominant, you can then do what you like :laughing:

#26

It’s easy to milk, when you are a monopoly, but adoption of new standards will always be a slow moving challenge.

TBH closed garden is sometimes beneficial. I remember Reason being super solid and worked well on low speced machines, before they implemented VSTs.

As a dev, did you ever collaborate with someone, considered it, or talked about not releasing simmilar things at the same time, or you always had to do your own research? (that is, if you are a lead or a solo dev)

#27

yeah, I frequently collaborate (including on unreleased products)
as I said, its a matter of trust, and having good communications.

what I tend to do though, is do my own research first, and so build up a reputation, then usually I get approached… and we work out together if there is an opportunity for collaboration, and what form that might take.
(Im an advocate of open source dev, so that influences things a lot, sometimes for good, sometimes not :wink: )

why do I do it this way?
again, we all have a plethora of opportunities, and we all have thousands of ideas.
too often, people will want to talk the talk, but they dont actually get around to do anything, and that feels likes its wasting others time,

I will also say, dev without collaboration or with hands off collaboration, does have the advantage that you dont put undue expectations on yourself.
frankly, its why many devs wont discuss future features / products in advance, I much prefer to let my releases do the talking :wink:

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#28

Thanks a lot for this insight.

I tried to look for some of your projects on here but were not successful. If you can, I’m interested to see some of your work, might find something interesting for me (not sure if it’s music related).

#29

in the music tech field, I just do this as a ‘hobby’… as I thought it be fun to use skills learnt as a software engineer (etc) in a different field.

as for projects, check out my YouTube channel, you’ll see some projects which have involved varying degrees of collab.
(depending on projects and other things, I sometimes need to be more discrete, again all come back to trust etc… knowing when to talk about things , and even more importantly , when not ! )

at SB you might see/hear something Im working on at the moment , assuming its ready in time…
talking of which time to sign off, and go work on it :wink:

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#30

Will keep an eye out for sure!

#31

I am not in music business but with what I know, I can say big corporations probably don’t do this. They have shareholders, boards, law departments, sensitive intellectual property concerns etc. I can see small brands or a group of developers, musicians etc. doing own thing and collaborate with each other. Maybe perhaps with larger companies too. But I am afraid if they are not business savvy, they may not get the full benefits they should get from their efforts.