The risk of using Spitfire plugin on a commercial project

[Kyle Preston]

I haven't actually studied it but I feel like something like this must have happened around the Napster days with the perceived value of music. Albums went from $14 to free and so getting people to willingly pay $14 for them again was an uphill battle, and the eventual compromise was streaming services that are really cheap for the consumer (thus palatable as an alternative to pirating, especially with the threat of your ISP coming after you) but it took a really heavy toll on the artists. Right?

This is exactly what happened. Some economists predicted that for listeners, "unlimited options" would outweigh the risk of illegality through piracy. Whereas others (typically from a psychological bent) fretted over users getting accustomed to cheap or "free" music and would eventually lose their incentive to pay for it.

What's really interesting though, I read this in Donald Passman's book, is that in the heyday of CD sales, an average CD buyer spent about $45 per year on CDs. But today, if we balance for GDP in the countries that stream music, the average user spends about $7 per month, so $84 a year on music.

That's pretty significant, and is a good argument for subscription. But, it's also worth mentioning that the experience is so different today as a listener. Spotify is more of a content factory where we're all milk cows, and "content" is more important than "albums". So, it's a tradeoff without an easy answer. But interesting none-the-less.

 

[jbuhler]

This is exactly what happened. Some economists predicted that for listeners, "unlimited options" would outweigh the risk of illegality through piracy. Whereas others (typically from a psychological bent) fretted over users getting accustomed to cheap or "free" music and would eventually lose their incentive to pay for it.

What's really interesting though, I read this in Donald Passman's book, is that in the heyday of CD sales, an average CD buyer spent about $45 per year on CDs. But today, if we balance for GDP in the countries that stream music, the average user spends about $7 per month, so $84 a year on music.

That's pretty significant, and is a good argument for subscription. But, it's also worth mentioning that the experience is so different today as a listener. Spotify is more of a content factory where we're all milk cows, and "content" is more important than "albums". So, it's a tradeoff without an easy answer. But interesting none-the-less.

Well, it wasn’t a straight line from Napster to Spotify. digital downloads (iTunes) was an initial response to Napster that proved robust until streaming broke that model.

 

[soapmak3r]

The thing that confuses me about Spitfire's current system is that in order to 'fix' the library, I already need to be logged into my account through their install manager.
The additional restriction of a limited number of 'repairs' seems completely redundant to me.
It seems like the way that they have implemented the DRM, whether system based IDs or some other method, is totally broken.
The only thing that I changed was the removal of a Thunderbolt 4 external hub, or perhaps connecting an external hard drive.

Loading up a project to find that a library needs 'repaired' is annoying enough, but closing down the project and DAW, opening the install manager, only to find that you have no more 'repairs' left and have to reach out to support is a slap in the face.

It is disheartening to see that this thread has been around for so long and people are still experiencing these issues.
DRM that frustrates and inconveniences paying customers, discouraging them from buying more of your products doesn't really make any sense at all.

 

[timprebble]

There IS one thing you can pre-emptively do to avoid (or at least minimise) potential pain:
print stems! As soon as you have a workable version of a cue, print stems of it!

I tend to route every instance of Kontakt directly to its own audio track and I monitor it that way, so the act of printing a version takes real time at the most, and there is no set up time.
And every time that cue is 'improved' I print new stems of it.

Many DAWS can also freeze a track (ie render a version) much faster than real time.
Even if you have no doubts about the reliability of your setup, it is still wise to do.

The change from 32bit to 64bit plugins also means some older plugins won't ever be updated to work in a 64 bit environment (same for updating to new M1 macs etc), so if you don't print stems of any sounds created with those 32 bit plugins then it may become very very difficult to recover those sounds ever again eg I used to like the RobPapen synth Albino 3, had lots of great presets for it & used it in many sessions over many years, none of which are accessible now, if I had not printed stems.

 

[nuyo]

The thing is, we never hear of the thousands of users who post threads saying: just to let everyone know, everything is working normal with the spitfire player and I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary.

I hope the OP gets his problem sorted. Maybe contact another composer friend in NYC and use their computer / Logic just to finish the que??

And don't forget the people (like myself) who just stop and ignore Spitfires Player because it doesn't work as easy as a Kontat Library.

 

[Kyle Preston]

Well, it wasn’t a straight line from Napster to Spotify. digital downloads (iTunes) was an initial response to Napster that proved robust until streaming broke that model.

iTunes itself was a robust response, but it never made up for lost sales due to piracy. Because legally, MP3 players, like iPods, were considered fancy hard drives and not “recording devices”, like Walkman’s. It’s an important distinction because most people were buying iPods to store pirated music, not to buy albums on iTunes. And since iPods were just fancy hard drives, Apple and others weren’t legally responsible for what users did with them.

That’s why I don’t think iTunes was ever a realistic replacement for CD sales. A million iPods sold should’ve meant tens of millions of albums sold, but that wasn’t even close to the reality.

In this way, streaming seemed inevitable because Spotify replaced that vacuum of lost sales.

 

[jbuhler]

iTunes itself was a robust response, but it never made up for lost sales due to piracy. Because legally, MP3 players, like iPods, were considered fancy hard drives and not “recording devices”, like Walkman’s. It’s an important distinction because most people were buying iPods to store pirated music, not to buy albums on iTunes. And since iPods were just fancy hard drives, Apple and others weren’t legally responsible for what users did with them.

That’s why I don’t think iTunes was ever a realistic replacement for CD sales. A million iPods sold should’ve meant tens of millions of albums sold, but that wasn’t even close to the reality.

In this way, streaming seemed inevitable because Spotify replaced that vacuum of lost sales.

It would be more accurate to say that Spotify destroyed what was left of the market. It turns out that most people prefer to rent their music and stream it rather than own it. Consumers may be paying more per year in music with streaming subscriptions but if so that money isn’t for the most part flowing to the artists. And if artists were mostly worse off with iTunes than selling CDs they are now mostly worse off with streaming than with iTunes.

 

[Kyle Preston]

Consumers may be paying more per year in music with streaming subscriptions but if so that money isn’t for the most part flowing to the artists.

Do you have any data or studies to back this up? I know this is a popular topic for op-eds and thinkpieces, but, the numbers, as far as I can tell, don't agree with this. Especially for independent artists.

There's plenty to criticize about Spotify, but I really don't agree that they destroyed what was left of the market. There was nothing left to destroy. It's true, consumers (currently) prefer to rent their music rather than buy it. But they also prefer to rent it rather than pirate it.

 

[SupremeFist]

The CEO of Universal made $300 million last year, without as far as I know releasing any of his own music.

 

[jbuhler]

Do you have any data or studies to back this up? I know this is a popular topic for op-eds and thinkpieces, but, the numbers, as far as I can tell, don't agree with this. Especially for independent artists.

Everything I’ve read suggests Independent artists—if we’re talking about those artists who used to make their money touring and selling CDs and merch—yield virtually nothing from streaming, and as far as I’m aware iTunes didn’t much change that part of the independent CD market, but streaming has basically destroyed it. What numbers do you have to suggest otherwise?

 

[Kyle Preston]

I mean, I'm not the one claiming that streaming "destroyed" the music industry. If we really believe that, then why? Because it feels true?

Obviously, the big corporate entities have mostly only ever cared about the top tier (financially speaking) artists [some of the history is outlined here]. In that respect, nothing at all has changed. Spotify isn't to blame for that. CDs were never going to replace what piracy destroyed, and I'm not sure if you're suggesting that streaming destroyed merch sales?

But, here are some numbers:
- Music Business Worldwide

My general takeaway was this, of the 8 million artists on Spotify, 5.4 million of them, 68%, have uploaded less than 10 tracks. Does any serious artist expect to make their living from just 10 tracks on streaming services?

Where Spotify needs to do better is in how they support the artists who are, at least in their terms, "professional". Which they define as either having more than 10,000 monthly listeners, or based on successful ticket sales, or some combination of both. Only 8% of these professionals earn more than $50,000 per year on Spotify, which, imo, isn't even close to good enough (I'm biased because I'm in the other 92%).

But the bleak reality is, to quote the article:

“To put it a slightly crueller way, 98% of the 8 million artists on Spotify today either aren’t popular enough to have 10,000 monthly listeners, or have released [fewer] than 10 tracks to date.”

I don't really see how this is Spotify's fault, when 40,000 (not 60,000) songs are uploaded every day to their platform.

- Here's a Music Ally analysis that emphasizes the same reality.
- Other things I think Spotify should do
- Also, findings from the RIAA explain all of this as well.



Key takeaways are:

"While the iTunes Music Store pushed back against unauthorized file-sharing, and also took revenue share from CD sales, that shift was transitory, setting the stage for streaming."

...

"But “renting music” via subscription service has proved to be the most important savior of the U.S. music business, contributing $7-billion in 2020 and accounting for nearly 58% of total 2020 revenue."

I know earning money from streaming services can feel like squeezing juice from a rock. I'm painfully aware, really, but we have to be able to talk about the actual reality of our situation as artists.

And I don't mean to take away too much more from the original thread, even though I think there are some seriously useful parallels between music streaming and the VI industry. Hopefully we learn the lessons from the former.

 

[jbuhler]

I mean, I'm not the one claiming that streaming "destroyed" the music industry. If we really believe that, then why? Because it feels true?

Obviously, the big corporate entities have mostly only ever cared about the top tier (financially speaking) artists [some of the history is outlined here]. In that respect, nothing at all has changed. Spotify isn't to blame for that. CDs were never going to replace what piracy destroyed, and I'm not sure if you're suggesting that streaming destroyed merch sales?

But, here are some numbers:
- Music Business Worldwide

My general takeaway was this, of the 8 million artists on Spotify, 5.4 million of them, 68%, have uploaded less than 10 tracks. Does any serious artist expect to make their living from just 10 tracks on streaming services?

Where Spotify needs to do better is in how they support the artists who are, at least in their terms, "professional". Which they define as either having more than 10,000 monthly listeners, or based on successful ticket sales, or some combination of both. Only 8% of these professionals earn more than $50,000 per year on Spotify, which, imo, isn't even close to good enough (I'm biased because I'm in the other 92%).

But the bleak reality is, to quote the article:

“To put it a slightly crueller way, 98% of the 8 million artists on Spotify today either aren’t popular enough to have 10,000 monthly listeners, or have released [fewer] than 10 tracks to date.”

I don't really see how this is Spotify's fault, when 40,000 (not 60,000) songs are uploaded every day to their platform.

- Here's a Music Ally analysis that emphasizes the same reality.
- Other things I think Spotify should do
- Also, findings from the RIAA explain all of this as well.


Key takeaways are:

"While the iTunes Music Store pushed back against unauthorized file-sharing, and also took revenue share from CD sales, that shift was transitory, setting the stage for streaming."

...

"But “renting music” via subscription service has proved to be the most important savior of the U.S. music business, contributing $7-billion in 2020 and accounting for nearly 58% of total 2020 revenue."

I know earning money from streaming services can feel like squeezing juice from a rock. I'm painfully aware, really, but we have to be able to talk about the actual reality of our situation as artists.

And I don't mean to take away too much more from the original thread, even though I think there are some seriously useful parallels between music streaming and the VI industry. Hopefully we learn the lessons from the former.

I know lots of artists, folks who once upon a time would have been able to scratch out a living playing music and no longer can. They now play music as a hobby because there’s not a living in it. Indeed they generally do it at a loss.

I thought your claim was that Spotify had made things easier for independent artists. Nothing in any of this data suggests that. It indeed points to a concentration in the industry where the top talent continues to do fine but the lower tiers do not. Oddly digital downloads don’t register in that chart until 2005 even though iTunes starts selling in 2001 downloads.

In any case, no one is disputing that streaming has displaced CDs and digital downloads or that consumers like streaming (indeed I stated that evidently consumers prefer to rent their music) or that the business execs are finding a way to get streaming to work for the big recording companies. But that doesn’t mean it’s working for most of the artists, even as you note for the vast majority of artists that Spotify deigns to recognize as professionals, it’s yielding more than $50k a year for 8%. It would be interesting to know how this compares to the age of iTunes and indeed the age of CDs. My guess is the tail was much thicker earlier, that is more musicians were able to make money at it.

If your point is that the industry has been able to reorganize its business to use streaming to capture a larger revenue flow, I would agree that seems to be the case, but the recapture is for the most part not finding its way to artists.

The parallels between the vi market and the music market and how piracy might affect them seem hard to make clear. The sampling companies are like recording companies in the analogy and the artists are the musicians who are being sampled. (The latter aren’t figuring in the sample discussion much at all.) The sampling companies are like the recording companies in believing piracy to be a significant problem. They are both working with a product whose marginal cost is extremely low, essentially the price of digital storage and the bandwidth to deliver it to the consumer. They both sell with a significant mark-up over that marginal cost, which makes it a tempting target for piracy. So there are some similarities. Sampling companies don’t stream for the most part and it’s hard to see how that would scale in practice at current bandwidths, but some companies offer subscriptions, which is probably a decent analog to streaming. But the market for VIs seems quite different from the recording market. For one thing the sample market remains closer to the stage of iTunes, with digital downloads dominating distribution, and the companies face
threats of easy proliferation through cracked software but also from the ease of something like Logic’s Autosampler that makes resampling extraordinarily easy. This is similar to the threat of the mp3, the small size of which allowed file sharing services like Napster to proliferate. Where the recording market embraced streaming before the recording companies were really ready for it, as far as I can tell, the virtual instrument market has a lot of built in resistance to the subscription model.
Given that, it’s hard to see what lessons sampling companies should take from the recording industry.

 

[ALittleNightMusic]

What streaming did was expand the exposure an artist could get. Broadened their audience base because there’s no cost of entry for a new listener to explore their music (which is a unique benefit of streaming). The revenue from streaming isn’t going to be what sustains an artist (except for the very top few) - instead, the artist needs to leverage the audience that streaming can reach and monetize them in other ways (touring, merch, etc). Spotify provides a lot of data about audiences to artists for example. However, now there’s a lot of playlist manipulation happening - ultimately listeners can’t differentiate and it costs streaming services a lot less to make flat rate deals with no-name artists that can write in a specific style. The other challenge is more so for folks “behind the boards” - the songwriters, mixers, producers. They have traditionally benefited strictly from record sales (physical and digital), but have seen their revenue dwindle due to streaming royalty rates. Sync deals are great for them, if the artist / agents / they can land those. Tough shift though - will see how things change in the next 5-10 years.

Source: used to be pretty senior at Spotify

 

[MauroPantin]

I've not had the Spitfire player screw with me yet, but this issue in general is another piece of the puzzle that is constantly inching me towards doing my own libraries, although obviously 1) that's a difficult and expensive solution and 2) it doesn't free you from the need for a flawed (and surely not immortal) platform like Kontakt, unless you build your own... which may have crossed my mind as well.

You can use HISE. I made a couple of personal libraries on it before I was able to purchase the full Kontakt player. Not as powerful as KTK of course but it gets the job done for something simple.

 

[soapmak3r]

I have contacted Spitfire support and suggested that until they have 'repaired' the issues with their authorization system, they should not be restricting the number of 'repairs' that customers can perform.
The fact that we have to be logged into our Spitfire account in order to use their install manager should be enough.
I would encourage others experiencing issues to appeal to them to do this.

I want to be able use the library that I paid for without issue or inconvenience. I don't think that this is an unreasonable expectation.

 

[Michael Antrum]

Back In the day I was visiting a client, and discovered they were using about 25 copies of Quark XPress that were cracked. When In pointed this out to one of the managers, he showed me the software cupboard where they had the correct number of Xpress boxes with serial numbers.

He explained that they had so many problems with the legit versions randomly de-authorising themselves, and that the support line was so poor, that they used a cracked version as it was way more reliable......

 

[MartinH.]

Would be interesting (although impossible) to know the relative damage that changes in the supply and demand balance did compared to piracy. I would expect there is actually a decrease in the demand for music as less people commute to work, and more people listen to podcasts or play games to fill their free time. And we know for a fact that the amount of available music is only ever increasing.
With sample libraries the amount of consumers is probably still increasing as hobby composing gets more and more accessible, but after you have 20 string libraries, do you really need that many more? Won't there eventually be a saturation of that market where people won't even want to pirate more libraries because SSD space is expensive and they don't even use half of what they already have?

 

[PrimeEagle]

after you have 20 string libraries, do you really need that many more?

This might be the wrong place to ask that...

 

[Shad0wLandsUK]

Back In the day I was visiting a client, and discovered they were using about 25 copies of Quark XPress that were cracked. When In pointed this out to one of the managers, he showed me the software cupboard where they had the correct number of Xpress boxes with serial numbers.

He explained that they had so many problems with the legit versions randomly de-authorising themselves, and that the support line was so poor, that they used a cracked version as it was way more reliable......

I have heard of such situations myself...
Not good

All of them need to step up their game

 

[AndyP]

Back In the day I was visiting a client, and discovered they were using about 25 copies of Quark XPress that were cracked. When In pointed this out to one of the managers, he showed me the software cupboard where they had the correct number of Xpress boxes with serial numbers.

He explained that they had so many problems with the legit versions randomly de-authorising themselves, and that the support line was so poor, that they used a cracked version as it was way more reliable......

I remember that very well, the old Apple Talk serial connection where the dongles were attached. That was extremely unstable and probably also a reason why Indesign has prevailed.