One little countdown teaser, no run of slick, expensive marketing videos.
Nothing at NAMM.
As RMR pointed out in his video, synthfluencers are a cheap option for manufacturers.
My point, I guess, is that all Akai have done is release a refresh of one of their flagships and used some marketing to tell people about it. Some of the reactions on here seem like Akai have done something wrong or something.
Whatever though, you all sound much more experienced in product design, marketing and running businesses than me, so crack on, I guess.
Sure people make things. But the sort of things we’re talking about making also requires pretty serious investment in infrastructure to make it. Capitalism in terms of investment in the means of production that’s way beyond the scope of one person’s lifetime of output. Not really making a judgement call, it’s just this stuff relies on what’s come before. Capitalism is a system people use to produce stuff.
Look, there’s no point in discussing economic systems on this forum. You wondered about the reasons, I told you the reason, which is for-profit product planning, which is an inevitable outcome of capitalism. That’s it. They could put out the most amazing device right now with all you ever wished for, but they won’t. It will be a crippled version, followed by a slightly upgraded one. They have several years planned in advance like this. It is the profitable thing to do.
It might appear large scale to you, and maybe to smaller manufacturers… but to Akai/inMusic this wouldn’t have even gone above the monthly allocated marketing spend… NAMM, in the same month, would have cost them $75k-$150k, minimum.
You give 20 MPC X SE’s out at say $500/pc cost, $10k… you get the picture, this was a good month for them, a low key launch of a new flagship product.
Definitely low-key, small, barely registered marketing. I wouldn’t even give it the dignity of calling it a campaign.
The market for the X is small. Akai knows this, and put out an effort equal to the task. There was nothing shocking, upsetting, or anything deserving of any emotional reaction such as anger to this announcement and hardware upgrade.
If you like the widget but the widget. If you don’t like the widget, don’t buy the widget.
There is no widget out there that will make your music better. That will only come from within.
As an owner of the original MPC X I‘m disappointed and relieved at the same time that Akai didn’t make a more meaningful / radical development jump with this update. The form factor of the X has been around since at least the MPC Ren, the 4GB Ram are hardly noteworthy, the design and colour scheme is nicer than the black and red in my book…but not enough for me to want to “upgrade” (which is where the relieve comes from). I was hoping they’d release MPC 3.0 with it, which they didn’t, which is where my disappointment stems from.
All in all I’d say this is a typical Akai/inMusic move, so not much to see here really…
Got it thanks, to me this doesn’t feel like a strong indication at all… And in my mind, it’d be crazy to drop version 3 before they have solved hygiene features like reorder FX, default save location etc. But that’s just me Time will tell!
I absolutely agree but new and flashy sells harder than features that should have been there to start with. I assume they will not only drop 3.0 but it will open up a big new can of bugs and won’t contain the most requested features. It will likely contain more sales points, some dumb shit like akai cloud hosting for samples that doesn’t quite work right
I’m sort of neutral could be better could be worse. I think music gear suffers from being similar to other tech but without the same economy of scale. It’s up against modern computers and iPads and it just makes it seem like absolute dinosaur tech. Obviously akai aren’t selling billions of units like apple so we basically have to be thankful for 10+ year old tier tech then compare it to our laptops and ipads. going off this fact of life I’d rather my old tech doesn’t badly pretend to be new. My only real issue with akai though is them dropping releases with impossible to miss major issues. I jumped ship and it would take something pretty next level to make me hop back aboard to be honest. I still watch from a distance but I think it’s pretty clear what their game is
Definitely not interested in getting into that discussion. You brought it up and I think you’re basically right about the profit motive, I was pointing out all this gear is a benefit of a few hundred years of that particular system. Thing is I reckon it’s more about getting something into stores at a price point than it is about gimping something deliberately so they can sell something similarly gimped in a few more years. Vote with your cash I guess.
Yeah… I would definitely add some analog oscillators too, visual synthesis a la Metasynth, a granular sampling engine, patch points for Eurorack compatibility and a battery power option.
And if it could have two wheels and pedals, THAT would be great.
Capitalism doesn’t produce anything. Systems don’t produce anything. People do, let’s be real.
Time will tell!