Hi everybody.
Just out of curisity.
Did someone know the sales numbers of Elektron (and not only) devices?
MD, OT, DT… but also other gear, synth, groovebox, sampler ecc. in actual market or in history.
I know for a fact that it’s more than 5. After that is anyone’s guess.
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I’ve often wondered that myself. With any hobby that requires semi-expensive/expensive gear there are so many companies each offering so many products or product lines. How can a niche hobby like electronic music production be that big?
One small hint I saw a while back when first researching the DT was Cuckoo’s tutorial video.
Super long, deep dive into the nitty gritty of the DT. It has over 400K views. Who on earth would want that much info on the DT unless they either own it or seriously intend to purchase it. People with mild interests in it or just like electronic music would probably skew towards a more introductory and/or performance video. That made me think that the market for these is much bigger than I guessed. There is no way that Elektron has moved 400K DTs. My napkin estimate was originally something like 5,000 units. I bet it is a lot bigger though.
I read this summary a while ago:
The ENTIRE synth market is $78M. Depending on what you do for a living, you can easily see how that stacks up against your company and/or industry for comparison.
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That’s a lot, I’m sure I watched it at least 2 1/2 or 3 times so I bet you could half the number of viewers.
I think that’s annual growth in the synth market, not total market size. I wouldn’t be surprised if the likes of Korg or Roland turn that over all by themselves.
The link you’ve left says the “market will grow by $78M”
Where are you getting the number of the entire synth market?
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The 3% CAGR (calculated annual growth rate) is 78 million. So the market before that growth is 2.6 billion usd. (78/3 is 1% or about 26million, times 100)
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Yes! I caught that error about 10 minutes after posting. Serves me right for reading it too quickly. Thanks for doing the math.
Maybe product serial numbers might give some indication?
I would guess the big boxes like AR/A4/OT don’t sell hugely well, but considering how many pictures/people talking about the DN/DT I see, those two must have sold a hell of a lot.
I’m honestly not sure if the Model series kept up with the DN/DT as I don’t tend to see them that often, but could be where I’m looking.
…no one will tell u…in detailed numbers…
sure is…elektron is still a small business compared to roland, akai, korg…u name it…
but while still being considered a boutique stuff company, it has grown out of that since releasing the takt…that was the game changer in selling numbers…
when elektron entered the mid price segment for the first time…
boutique for everybody now…that was quite a big rush forward…
and never underestimate all THIS hobby market…it’s huuuuuuuuuuge…
with the century break, producing music became THE everybodies darling hobby. number 1…
pretty much everybody loves music in one way or the other…and being a musician, or even a star some day is endless apealing to almost everyone these days…
and so is the hopeful phrase number 1 ever…make ur hobby ur profession…live the dream…
no chance, this hobby will come to an end any soonish…
I think electronic music gear is as close to video gaming as making music. For a lot of people, it’s about buying complex gear, learning how to use them and then moving on to the next piece of gear, with little to no actual music made. There’s a huge amount of tech heads for whom the hobby is building a system, not to make music to be published or played live. IMO it was a genius move by whoever it was who first started marketing synths to tech nerds as opposed to musicians.
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I found some financial figures reported by Elektron Music Machines AB. For 2019 they have reported sales of about 16 million USD, a loss of 1.8 million, and about 50 employees.
To reach this sales figure, I assume they must have sold about 20,000 boxes for an average sales price of 800 USD (unless I am missing another source of income here).
(For comparison: Arturia (July 2019-June 2020) - 36.6M USD sales, 8.8M USD profit, 74 employees)
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Yikes, that’s quite a loss. Hope they can turn a profit soon.
Yes, here are their figures for three years - sorry for the text in French - all figures are in USD (or in %).
I’m in two very active facebook groups, one for the M:S and one for both the Model boxes. Half of what gets posted (at least) are RTFM questions from people who seem totally new synths, drum machines, samplers etc. One group has about 1.7K members and the other about 1.1K
At the new price point of around $300USD they almost have to be doing decent, but then I’m biased as I think they are both a steal at that price.
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Also worth mentioning Elektron’s revenue increased 6 or 7 times since 2010.
Same with their number of employees. Octatrack and Digitakt were game changers.
800 USD per box maybe a little optimistic. Most are sold by retailers who put their margin on it. Also income from service works and selling accessories, soundpacks can have a share of 5-10% from the revenue.
20k can be a good estimation for total, I guess half of that are Digitakt and Digitone.
1-2k for Octa and Analogs each, the rest are Models.
Samples sold not so well, Cycles maybe better. I am not a retailer but I guess a big retailer like Thomann knows these numbers very well.
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The most interesting data point I discovered in this thread is that Elektron is roughly the same size as Sequential, revenue-wise, based on the numbers that were floated around when the Focusrite acquisition was announced. I found that surprising. I always assumed Sequential was much larger than Elektron.
I don‘t have a source handy, so take this with more than just a little grain of salt, but I seem to recall that somewhere it was mentioned they sold 10 times as many Digitakts in the year after release as they sold OTs in total.
I once read, or maybe watched something along the lines of everybody in each of the Scandinavian countries can look at the tax returns of anybody in their own country.
I know it’s unrelated to business accounts/sales figures etc, but I find it interesting that nationals can see how much the big players at Elektron are earning, or taking from the company.
Probably stops people within Scandinavia from buying stuff they can’t afford.