New document… and this one is a real lol. Famous fanboy out in force.
" Ironically the noisiest opponent of the deal is inMusic, an entity performing a decades‐long roll‐up of companies in the industry. Sadly they tend to operate those businesses in a model that Warren Buffett describes as “taking the last puff of smoke off a cigar.” inMusic has an amazing collection of assets and seemingly limitless cash and appetite to buy more. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that they have no open job listings for software engineers. I’d urge them to focus on innovating and stop blowing smoke.
The products inMusic claims they can’t compete with are easy to interoperate with and, should they desire to do so, not difficult to replicate (I say this as someone who shipped 30 audio products in four years with only two employees). Volunteer open‐source efforts have already done so – with documentation better than the commercial offerings. Meanwhile the broader tech industry is going through a sea change, the biggest reset of the wild west that anyone’s seen in twenty years."
how the author arrived at innovation being a direct result to profit is a strange stance to take, Innovation does not = profit sales = profit once overheads are cleared thats just basic business common sense in order to make sales you need people to sell to, if the majority of potential customers are already invested in the dominant company competing companies will make minimum returns and will be forced out the market (hence the monopoly concern) a point in music is making in opposition to the acquisition. The author is actually giving more reasons to doubt the suitability of the acquisition as opposed to his intended support of it.
I’ve found a lot of the ‘submissions’ coming out in support of the acquisition end up not making the point they think they are making.
I haven’t, or wouldn’t personally add my own thoughts to it, but if I did choose to, the number one rule would be to leave emotions at the door. Something which a lot of these documents have failed to do.
There is another official document uploaded, I’m just working my way through it now. One thing I noticed is it seems to reference DDJT and how they are funded by Alpha, I’m fairly certain Phil Morse isn’t going to be happy about that, given his recent posts about the subject.
This at least gives the so-called influencers the opportunity of promising the world that they arnt funded/owned/pwned by “Pioneer” (coz they’re pwned by AlphaTheta instead lol.
Yeah - I think it’s referencing the survey being sponsored by AT (presumably by providing kit as a prize) but the wording they’ve used doesn’t make that clear.
Yeah it’s definitely misleading on their part. This is the issue with a lot of the stuff ive been reading in those documents, neither side is coming out of it looking particularly great.
It seems unlikely to me that this merger is blocked. InMusic owns the rights to Torq 2.0 (which was I believe written by AIR) and Deckadance. They even have MixMeister. Lots of acquisitions, but mostly just using old brand names to sell new InMusic product lines. It’s not Alpha Theta’s problem if InMusic isn’t doing much with this IP. We’ll see what happens, though. If the merger happens, maybe it will compel InMusic to take on additional IP and/or do more with what they’ve already got.
I also can’t be certain what Alpha Theta is going to do with Serato. They say it’d remain mostly independent, but there’s not much pattern to go by. I suppose TAD, an old Pioneer of Japan acquisition, was sort of consistent with staying pretty independent. It’d obviously be their prerogative how Serato is run after merger, but consumers being worried might be in for a pleasant surprise. In contrast, I can’t think of a single acquisition by InMusic that has gone that route, even with Rane.
What you need to think about is how motivated Alphatheta will be to pay 2 dev teams to keep 2 pieces of software running that do essentially the same thing.
I can agree that whether Rekordbox & Serato will continue to coexist shouldn’t factor into any government’s decision as to whether to allow the merger. They should assume a worst-case that eventually the two will not continue to both exist, since governments won’t be able to dictate how the company is micromanaged in that way. To my knowledge, though, InMusic has discontinued or at least ceased all development on every DJ mixing / controller / DVS software meant for a mac or PC they’ve ever acquired. They’re not even actively involved in the market currently. I think Native Instruments, Atomix, and Algoriddim have more sway for such a pre-emptive action to prevent a merger. Until Alpha Theta actually does something egregiously anti-competitive on the topic, I don’t think InMusic has as much to assert just on the ability to sell products that support Serato.
Isn’t the promise to not do anything with Serato until 2027, where they’re free to do as they like after that? I’m sure I read that within all the docs.
Torq, Deckadance, Mixmeister, MPC, Arkaos, Air, SoundSwitch (probably one or two that I’ve missed).
I think it’s risky to compare the acquisition of torq, deckadance and mixmeister, which were only marginally used software, with serato, which is one of the two most widely used software packages in the industry, along with rekordbox. Serato’s market share is out of all proportion to the market share held by InMusic’s software at the time they was acquired. You have to compare like with like. The scale is not at all the same when it comes to the risk of monopoly.
You would think that with enough such acquisitions, including the author company of Torq 2.0 under their belt, InMusic would be capable of mounting a competition, but they don’t seem to have even tried… unless you count turnkey Prime hardware with Engine OS. Serato’s market share actually only grew with InMusic’s actions. InMusic is not quite a direct competitor of Serato, though, rather is competing for hardware compatibility & support with Serato, and thus far seem to have nothing previous to complain about. Will they continue to have access to that market? I don’t know. If something changes, I think they have a stronger case after-the-fact than they have now, like the hardware OEMs that went after Microsoft.
I also think Native Instruments, Atomix, and Algoriddim have a much stronger case against Alpha Theta on this merger than InMusic does. Are Native Instruments, Atomix, and Algoriddim filing complaints to stop this? I’m not saying any of these entities shouldn’t be suing to stop it, but I don’t see the InMusic case being quite strong enough. Maybe I’m also biased, though, because I think VDJ is superior to all of them and the fact that Serato and Rekordbox are so popular is really just a sign of so many DJs being sheep. If Serato stops having widespread hardware support, I just figure more DJs will wise up and move to VDJ than Alpha Theta getting even more of the DJ software market. Maybe that’s being too hopeful.
Up until a few months ago they were sitting pretty with a good working partnership with the market leader… they probably never saw any intention of needing to spend money on software for that purpose.
