Tyler Turner wrote:
[snip]
Where
are Finale products at the www.jwpepper.com site?
Not on the home page,
where the visitor first looks around -- on that page
is a link to
download Sibelius' Scorch plug-in. Not either of
the first two products
on the Music Technology page, either. Finale is the
third product down.
This keeps being brought up. JW Pepper promotes
Sibelius greatly because they were for at least a long
time the only dealer in the United States that carried
Sibelius. When I went to purchase Sibelius in 2002, I
couldn't even find it in any of the music stores I
searched in Minneapolis (including Guitar Center and
Mars Music). If you have an exclusive deal on a
product, you do well to promote it.
I don't know who distributes Sibelius now, but that's
the deal with JW Pepper.
The first product, Sibelius Student Edition has a
yellow,
capture-the-audience's attention banner proclaiming:
The Notation
Solution for Students!
Yeah, great. And for $60-$70 you can purchase a
program with a lot more capability - PrintMusic -
which you can find even at Comp USA. Sorry, Sibelius
does not have the edge here.
I'm not saying the product is superior, just saying that MakeMusic
hasn't done what it needs to do to get its product listed! How can a
prospective buyer, going to JWPepper, even know that PrintMusic exists?
Read the
descriptions -- why is Sibelius made to seem much
better? Is it really
the world's best-selling notation software?
What does it take for a book to become a
"best-seller?" Sibelius has been making this claim
since version 1.x when it wasn't even known in the
United States. They obviously have never felt the term
can only apply to the product that has sold the best.
I don't claim that they are lying because I don't
claim to really understand the term "best-selling."
I know that for a book to become a best-seller it has to be sold. I
know that publishers BUY product placement in bookstores. I assume
Sibelius has done this with jwpepper, to ensure that it's product is
seen first and is seen to be superior to the competition. The truth of
the matter is never the issue with best-sellers, plain and simple
marketing. When I walk into a supermarket, clothing store, bookstore,
computer store, I know that anything I see when I walk in the door is
placed there because the manufacturer PAID to get it placed there.
Quality of product has absolutely nothing to do with it.
My only point in bringing up the product placement at jwpepper, a place
more music educators I know of would go looking for music products
rather than a computer store, has nothing to do with quality. I know
Finale is the superior product in many areas, it's my program of choice
when I get an engraving project. I want it to succeed and to gain back
market share it has lost to Sibelius.
I know product placement is important for that. Jwpepper may have been
the original distributor of Sibelius in the US, but Finale could have
given it deeper discounts, more spiffs, whatever Sibelius offered,
Finale could have bettered, so that jwpepper may have pushed Sibelius
but it would have pushed Finale MORE.
If Sibelius' claim is true, MakeMusic have already
lost the battle and
the war. If the claim isn't true, MakeMusic should
be fighting back in
public!
MakeMusic could come back from being behind and win
this. They're not behind, and I don't see them falling
behind, but saying that anything would be over is just
guess work. I don't know what the future has in store,
but I know that there are major innovations left to be
seen that can impact everything. SmartMusic
subscriptions from March 2004 to March 2005 jumped
from 22,100 to 37,500. They are growing at a faster
rate every year. This isn't a business I'd care to bet
against right now.
SmartMusic is indeed growing, that's an area where MakeMusic is doing a
great job of marketing, and it's a niche area which nobody has a
competing product in. A local band director just told me on Friday that
he had signed up and would be pushing subscriptions for his students.
That's wonderful.
I don't use SmartMusic, however, and I can foresee several potential
outcomes from its growth:
1) MakeMusic continues to improve Finale so that it can be marketed as
an adjunct for SmartMusic, so that music educators can create their own
SmartMusic accompaniments from scratch using Finale. So as long as
SmartMusic grows, Finale will continue to exist, although how much
further improvement is necessary to maintain Finale's SmartMusic link
remains to be seen;
2) MakeMusic realizes that nobody (outside of a few publishers) is using
Finale to create their own SmartMusic accompaniments, and so abandons
Finale to move all its development to the SmartMusic team, where it owns
the market, and also realizes that it can make even more money from
SmartMusic if there isn't a publicly available tool for creating
SmartMusic accompaniments and forces all of the endusers to go to
MakeMusic for their SmartMusic files;
3) MakeMusic changes marketing plans and pushes Finale harder and
recaptures much of the marketshare lost to Sibelius, and along the way
to accomplish this they incorporate all the ease-of-use features of
Sibelius, which along with the newly incorporated GPO and other NI
instrument playbac features will make Finale the blockbuster application
everybody will want to use, and leave Sibelius in the dust;
I agree anything is possible, and I hope/pray that #3 is the final outcome.
Let's see where things are at a few years from now and
then come back to this.
Sounds good to me! :-)
Peace,
David
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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