Ableton Forum

If a musician can get it for free, why would they buy it?

Because it stops working after a time

Like I said "fade" is a pretty new trend, I hear lots of games are using the
technique....... Sure macromedia, 3dsmax, adobe and all those used warez
to their advantage given the corporate market isn't prepared to risk $300k
fines and generally wants to keep things pretty legit. Musicians working
from home don't have this same kind of pressure, but when it stops
working and they can no longer work on their tunes... u can bet they'll buy
the very reasonably priced and very feature rich piece of software.

Most people like to own things that are so good to them, just sometimes
they need a chance to get hooked and a poke to remind them to pull out
the wallet.

-Ben

MrYellow wrote:It's called "Fade" the new trend in copy protection

Bezier curves in copy protection and not in the arrange! Now that's a new trend!

DeadlyKungFu wrote:Chuck Norris made that crack.

man stop it wahahahahahha

MrYellow wrote: "fade" is a pretty new trend

Hmmm, interesting article about it here: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4248

Thanks for the heads-up Ben, It's back to like borrowing a nice piece of hardware from a music shop "on appro".

hehe yeah they used to let u take games home to try

-Ben

sqook wrote:..., I can't think of how this scenario would benefit a company such as ableton....

As a way 'in' to a crowded market it works great.

Hypothetical Situation : You have a peice of software you have written, a crowd of competitors, no real brand penetration. your turnover is €1 million your userbase is 250,000


WHat is the standard way?
A marketing campaign, worldwide and comprehensive, companies will hapilly spend 50% of your turnover if this gets you 5 million users. That would increase your turnover to €20 million. But would anyone shift to your product in a feild that is all about the speed of use which comes from familiarity, a field which is very 'brand loyal'? Will an advert pry them away from a trusted familiar platform?
probably not.

the best form of marketing is personal recomendation - "Hi dave, your best friend here - I'm using Product X .. it's great! "

but how to get that PR ?

hmm, how to get a copy into the hands of the massess so that they can begin to recommend? You would happilly take the cost of 5 million 'promo copies' out of your marketing budget if it brings 5 million new users. Especially as the cost of 5 million promos compared to press advertising is actually nothing .. its software, no distribution cost!
But - how to do it without triggering the "bargain bucket effect", IE where you lower prices and the product is seen as actually worth less?

hmm, now how would I do that ?



yep, fade is a cool marketing trick rather than a copy protection. There is no such thing as protected, so why not make it work for you?

all live lite users can upgrade to live 5 for 199 eur/usd. before march 6.

Pitch Black wrote:

MrYellow wrote: "fade" is a pretty new trend

Hmmm, interesting article about it here: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4248

Thanks for the heads-up Ben, It's back to like borrowing a nice piece of hardware from a music shop "on appro".

while that seems like a good idea for things like ableton (where it just stops) if i had pirated
a game and it started doing strange things like that article suggests, i would not buy
it ever, i would percieve the game as being poorly written and full of bugs.

why pay money for that?

gomi wrote:

Pitch Black wrote:

MrYellow wrote: "fade" is a pretty new trend

Hmmm, interesting article about it here: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4248

Thanks for the heads-up Ben, It's back to like borrowing a nice piece of hardware from a music shop "on appro".

while that seems like a good idea for things like ableton (where it just stops) if i had pirated
a game and it started doing strange things like that article suggests, i would not buy
it ever, i would percieve the game as being poorly written and full of bugs.

why pay money for that?

I agree, if you dont know that this is an anti piracy bug, then i would only get fustrated with it and give up.

With music software, this could kill piracy, as it was mentioned earlier, crackers wont have enough time to fully test the cracks.

If people are having problems with it now because they are using cracks, they can wait until 6 gets cracked (in six months) or buy 5 now.

I bought my copy of Live cracked from Russia. When the CD arrived after 4 weeks, it had a crack in it and was unusable. (I had no idea the Russians were so literal.) So then I was forced to pay for the real version from Ableton.com.

If you ask me, that's pretty sneaky marketing on the Abe's part. Bastards!

i got pissed at when i brought the same subject up a few years ago .

MrYellow wrote:It's called "Fade" the new trend in copy protection.


Personally I believe the audio software industry owes a lot to crackers.
Lots of free marketing.


-Ben

Whats that for bullshit.
There are demo versions available.
And if someone like's a app, the word will be spread also.


Cuz of the cracks, software gets more expensive for their legit users.
Think about copyprotection where u have to pay for.
And what extra bugs it could trigger.

At the end, legit users wil pay the bill.
And also there is the fact that a legit user gets demotivated to buy legit soft anyway, cuz of the easy way u can get your hands on a cracked version.


Again....think about this.

There will always be bad things and good things - but there is no line between black and white like you suggest.
Saying "but there is a demo version" is meaningless - try telling your mugger that he could alternatively get a real job instead of stealing your cash.

But ... cracks do act as marketing, there's no doubt about that. It's not morally right, but then neither is all the computing technology that we use that was developed for killing people efficiently. There is no black and white, there is just a grey fog that has benefits and drawbacks.

You can imagine a world where no-one ever steals anything if you like, but in the real world there will always be stealing.

In the case of software it is just a COPY that is being stolen, like taking a photo of an antique vase. It has no intrinsic value, what has value is the license to use it. The value is notional, not real.
Luckily - a large percentage of crack users do buy the application, cracks seem to provide a road in that demo software does not. You can say that this is bad, but you cant change human nature, it is just the way humans work. If peopl buy after using a crack instead of a demo .. so what?

Additionally a large percentage of crack users promote the software as 'cool' to other potentially legitimate buyers. It's not an ideal situation, but then the human race is not ideal.

Sure, some crack users never buy the app, but then - fuck them, the percentages work out OK. Nothing is ever going to be 100% good and 75% is good enough in my book.

Ableton (and any realistic software company) are forced to accept the reality of the market, in business you must make the best of a bad situation.

all i know is that a demo that doesn't let you save your progress is completely useless in my books.

disable rendering, disable up to X amount of tracks.. disable whatever, just don't disable SAVE or there's no way ANYONE can get into the damn program efficiently enough to make the decision to buy or not.

For me, a proper demonstration ("test drive" if you will) is being able to sit down and actually make something, not just "look under the hood". For this, i thank the crackers way back in the day (version 3) for making it possible for me to decide that Live was the software I wanted.

So yeah, there is a purpose for the underground.

I'm really confused - is my myspace profile still set to private

I'm working on that - someone cracked my myspace page

As*holes!