Eric Dannewitz wrote: [snip]> Yeah, it is pretty silly. One of the schools near where I teach, the
instructor is all gung-ho over SmartMusic. They even flew in someone to demo it in Feb. Yet, when I made a SmartMusic file for Giant Steps (complete with BinaB backgrounds), they seemed to think it was some sort of voodoo magic. They don't seem to know SmartMusic and Finale are made by the same company...........
You would think that the company would retrain the people who do the "Gee, look at how wonderful SmartMusic is, and it will only cost you $xxxx to buy site license subscriptions for the entire school district each year" demonstration, which works well because SmartMusic Accompaniment System really is a good product for what it does (the recent complaints about the advertised 50 new titles per month failure aside), and several teachers around here use it a lot.
A smart business model (something that as time passes I am afraid MakeMusic has less and less of a clue about) would force those demonstrators to wrap up their jaw dropping demonstrations with a "And if you also purchase Finale for your district, you can create you very own SmartMusic Accompaniment files, tailor made to your students and your situations. And look, there is the Band-in-a-Box auto harmonizer and the MyBac Rhythm Generator to help you make killer big-band arrangements in no time, to help your students improve their jazz chops, and with the included SmartScore Lite, you can take your printed accompaniments to classical literature or a band part and within minutes have a SmartMusic Accompaniment file to assist a student learning a difficult part! Finale and SmartMusic -- the combination which will rocket your music department to the top of all the competitions!"
How much extra training time would that take? How much bigger would the inroads into the educational market be for Finale, if it were pitched heavily to all the current SmartMusic users?
We're not talking about the need for week-long training seminars at an expensive hotel to train the SmartMusic demonstrators, just the addition of a minute or two to the end of the SmartMusic demonstration (which apparently works well, because it is in many schools where Sibelius is the notation software!) to convert those schools to Finale, or at least to get one more copy sold to the school and gradually convert the faculty.
It's this lack of marketing smarts, packaging the two products into one demonstration, that makes me worry about the future of the company.
Conversely, if all those who try to pitch Finale to school districts were to make a lot about the ability to create SmartMusic files from Finale, they might be able to make much larger inroads into the school market. I'm not talking about a throwaway sentence "Oh yeah, and you can create SmartMusic accompaniment files, too." added at the end in an almost apologetic way -- I'm talking about an energetic enthusiastic "And look at what ELSE Finale can do!" presentation.
They might make twice the sales (Finale and SmartMusic both in one sale) instead of relying on the SmartMusic marketing to sell that product and the Finale marketing to sell that product with no real partnership.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
