You'd think.......but............
Yeah, I don't get it either. They use Sibelius for notation, but
SmartMusic in class. I mean, they spend a LOT of time using that program
in class. It is insane. I just wonder what evil exercises they'd put
together if they realized that Finale can make SmartMusic files.......
Better keep my mouth shut, for the sake of the kids ;-)
dhbailey wrote:
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.
_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
