Friends:
This year, I have chosen til now to stay out of the "Should I switch to
Sibelius" discussion. I won't be switching from Finale to Sibelius.
Finale still fits my needs, and comes closer to other principles than
Sibelius does. Indeed, some actions by MakeMusic actually make it more
like Sibelius than I prefer: the dropping of support for plug-in
development being one example, and the dropping of the ~.ETF file format
being another. Further, I'm not prepared to accept the statements about
the health of Sibelius. For one thing, it's easy to see how MakeMusic is
doing; they are open enough about their financial position that they
make obvious links to Investor information on their home page. Not so
with Sibelius, or it's parent, Avid. True, Avid is a publicly held US
company, and their information is available, but if links to Avid's
financial information are on their home page, I didn't see them, and
they are certainly not as prominent as the "Investor" links on the
MakeMusic home page. So with a couple of mouse clicks I can see exactly
how MakeMusic is doing; but while the information may be available, it
is not at all clear how Sibelius is doing, since all I found for Avid
seems to use consolidated earnings.
Around the first of the year (the announcement was in December 2006),
Hal Leonard announced the adoption of Finale as the software to use for
their new "music direct websites" for choir, band, and orchestra. Now,
the decision was announced in December, but the sites went live at about
that time, too, and the music on them was not prepared instantaneously,
Indeed, I suspect the decision as to which software was to be used on
the website was made several months in advance, probably some time in
the Spring. Surely it is just a coincidence that at about the time the
decision was made, Sibelius decided to accept a takeover offer.
Those of you who are interested in self publishing will be interested in
another difference between S~ and Finale, too. Where the Finale showcase
allows one to upload scores to share, S~ offers a store, where you can
upload scores to sell. I don't know exactly when this was rolled out, so
I don't know that it was a factor in the decision of Hal Leonard to
adopt Finale, but as I recall, at the time HL decided to adopt the S~
scorch product for SheetMusicDirect, Finale was owned by Net4Music,
which was offering a similar capability. An acquaintance I knew then at
HL would say that this played any role in the decision to adopt scorch
over Finale Viewer, but more interestingly, he wouldn't say it did not
have a role, either. The available titles on the Smart Music lists
include products from both Hal Leonard and Alfred; how may other music
publishers are going to consider the possible competition represented by
the Sibelius stores when deciding which software to use in house?
Then there's the question of other revenue streams from the same
product. Both S~ and Finale bring in money from the flagship product,
but in addition to this, MakeMusic has the additional revenue from the
other members of the family, for which S~ does not have analogous products.
Lastly, I see an issue of price. I wonder how many would be considering
a switch to S~ if you had to pay full price. I also wonder why Sibelius
feels the need to offer a price to a substantial part of their market to
offer their product for such a low cost. From the Website, the current
price of S~ 5 in the UK is 595 Pounds Sterling; in the US it's 599 US
Dollars. Given the fact that the current exchange rate (as I write this)
is 2 USD per 1 GBP, US buyers already get a 50 percent discount on the
price of the product. With the special offer on the competitive update
are getting the product for 8 percent of the British price, which is a
better offer than the retail establishment I passed yesterday, which was
selling for 30 percent of the regular price. Besides the sign in one
window announcing "70 percent off", there was another sign in the other
window, containing the legend "Going out of Business".
I don't mean to suggest that S~ is going out of business, but one has to
wonder about the low price on their product, even if it is temporary.
ns
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