The Great BitWig Migration

[Machinesworking]

very underwhelming, their twitter account hasn't had any activity for almost a week. but it doesn't seem so far fetched that they would sold 1000 copies. 400k seems to me like it could buy them a year. enough to release a more refined v2

I doubt they sold that many... but I hope they did well enough to keep going...

considering that Ableton stated that they had two million users in their public address at the announcement of Live 9, I could see Bitwig selling a lot more than 1000 copies. 1/2000 of Abletons 15 year sales record seams low, I would guess 5-10,000 users.

If all they sold was 400k worth of software they would be announcing crossgrade prices and spending more on marketing. 400k doesn't cover ten people for three years plus expenses on a business.

[ezelkow1]

I doubt they could start offering cross grades now, that would piss off a large portion of their cutomer base at this point giving a discount only a month after release. However I'm definitely expecting some around the holidays

[deva]

very underwhelming, their twitter account hasn't had any activity for almost a week. but it doesn't seem so far fetched that they would sold 1000 copies. 400k seems to me like it could buy them a year. enough to release a more refined v2

I doubt they sold that many... but I hope they did well enough to keep going...

considering that Ableton stated that they had two million users in their public address at the announcement of Live 9, I could see Bitwig selling a lot more than 1000 copies. 1/2000 of Abletons 15 year sales record seams low, I would guess 5-10,000 users.

If all they sold was 400k worth of software they would be announcing crossgrade prices and spending more on marketing. 400k doesn't cover ten people for three years plus expenses on a business.

Hey, maybe you are right... I doubt there are 2 million Live users though

[UncleAge]

I would have no idea if 2M represents all active users or not but I'd be willing to bet the number is more than 1M.

[Angstrom]

I always thought it was funny that the quote was about "Ableton users", not "sales of".
It made me wonder exactly where these Live users got their copy!

Source:
http://youtu.be/Y7dIkonCfFE?t=1m19s

[fishmonkey]

maybe they are including all the free versions that come with various bits of hardware...

[UncleAge]

Well there are a lot of folks on the planet. And the student license is somewhat affordable in a lot of places.

[eyeknow]

I think it's a couple of things. First, between all the copies they have and all the different types of musicians there are a ton of registrations. The crack heads likely don't really equate. Second, live appeals to the "new age" of "musician" from guitarists, to hip hop, to whatever. So between those, they have some pretty solid ground.

I dunno, I can't predict the future so I don't know what it holds for bitwig, but it's likely that it's going to be a much smaller slice than they anticipated unless the get on the ball. That's just my opinion, which of course doesn't necessarily mean there is any gospel there.

[Machinesworking]

My guess the 1.69 number is it's every purchase they've had since they started.
Purchase, not upgrade.

1.69 million I'm sure includes a lot of Live 4 versions that people never upgraded and Live Intro etc. that someone bought for $99 and decided it wasn't for them.

For fun the number is 1,697,421 if Ableton are being fair and not including every piece of hardware with Live light or whatever bundled with some M-Audio, novation etc. product then at the very least that's 100 times 1.6 million.
So yeah, this is probably a good reason to start your own company instead of work for one, when that company is worth at least 160 million dollars.

Bitwig will want to at least penetrate the market to 10,000 users which should be possible considering Ableton are claiming 1.6 million users, even if Ableton's numbers were off by a factor of ten that's 160,000 users who might upgrade at roughly $200, or 32 million.

Bitwig would with ten people working there, at coders wages be 4 million in the hole, but all that takes is 10,000 users buying the product. Then after that it's pretty solid. So yeah I would invest in them if they were a start up and I was loaded.

[re:dream]

This relates to something I have often wondered about - we have very little real market information about Live OR Bitwig

Comes with being a privately owned rather than a listed company I guess

But I have often* wondered: how is live 9 selling? How many *active* users are there (a damn sight less than 1.69 million, that's for sure!) How many Push controllers? How many live packs? Which of the 3 - Live, Push or Packs - is their chief earner? There's actually very little real information out there.

*OK, not often. Sometimes.

[eyeknow]

It's tough to say. I think that many people like the audio to midi, I'm absolutely CERTAIN that many a peeps have bought push and thus would have to have 9.

[Machinesworking]

But I have often* wondered: how is live 9 selling? How many *active* users are there (a damn sight less than 1.69 million, that's for sure!) How many Push controllers? How many live packs? Which of the 3 - Live, Push or Packs - is their chief earner?

Well if out of 1.69 million potential up-grader's Ableton get 40,000 to spend a minimum of $150 (on sale etc.) to upgrade, that's 6 million gross. Live packs are probably the lowest seller, and since there's profit sharing there we can leave those out, but if even 5,000 people buy Push, that's 2.5 million gross.

The thing that's really worked for Live is it's ability to be used in conjunction with another DAW. It didn't feel like I had to give up Logic when I purchased Live, and the only other DAW that works like this, as an add on to an existing ecosystem is Reason. Many people bought Live to use as a fun toy with Cubase etc. and now hardly use Cubase etc.


This also points out Bitwigs biggest flaw, it's inability to work with other DAWs, no MIDI export, no ReWire, no REX support, no MIDI Beat Clock sync. This is where I would be basically screaming my head off at the other developers to change this "plan" if I was involved. Not one thing stands out as a stupid decision on their part more than to not want to even try to integrate immediately with the existing ecosystem?

[fishmonkey]

This also points out Bitwigs biggest flaw, it's inability to work with other DAWs, no MIDI export, no ReWire, no REX support, no MIDI Beat Clock sync. This is where I would be basically screaming my head off at the other developers to change this "plan" if I was involved. Not one thing stands out as a stupid decision on their part more than to not want to even try to integrate immediately with the existing ecosystem?

i admire their passion and drive to create a new DAW, but strategically they have been a bit shortsighted. they painted themselves into a corner making something that is so similar in concept to Live, but with so many shortcomings. the flow of major bug reports in their KVR forum is relentless. i still think they have been overly ambitious and have underestimated the difficulty of designing and building a Live-like non-linear DAW from the ground up, that hosts VSTs and is cross-platform across OS X, Windows and Linux...

[Machinesworking]

i admire their passion and drive to create a new DAW, but strategically they have been a bit shortsighted. they painted themselves into a corner making something that is so similar in concept to Live, but with so many shortcomings. the flow of major bug reports in their KVR forum is relentless. i still think they have been overly ambitious and have underestimated the difficulty of designing and building a Live-like non-linear DAW from the ground up, that hosts VSTs and is cross-platform across OS X, Windows and Linux...

Honestly the demo works pretty dammed good on my system. I expect bugs when the product is first released, you can't possibly check every audio card, MIDI driver, plug in, and computer configuration before release, there's no way in hell a 1.0 DAW isn't going to be having some issues for some people. Honestly every DAW I've ever owned has had stable and unstable releases. Live 8 for instance, and Logic 7 for me, people complained about DP6…. Reaktor was unusable on a Mac until about 4.7, Absynth was a pig on PC for years etc.

That's not an issue to me, if they squash most of them in the coming months. What is an issue is an obvious decision to sandbox Bitwig Studio away from other DAWs. This is a major marketing flaw, because no matter how much I like shiny new things, there's no way in hell I'm giving up MIDI export and ReWire for much the same functions in my set up as Live. This goes all the way down to their sampler with it not supporting REX… and no sync capabilities at all.

[fishmonkey]

from what i've seen, people who have actually been trying to make music in Bitwig have been running into major workflow show-stoppers, including the omissions that you have mentioned.

i just think they spread themselves too thin, trying to achieve too much too quickly.

anyway, i hope they make it through...