We are here in a bubble.
We are constantly flooding our senses with synths, therefore we think all do it.
It’s normal behaviour.
We are niche as niche can get.
But we built our virtual world in the internet and are consuming this all the time.
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Unfortunately, my family won’t skew the statistics either way, since this handsome fellow also has access to his father’s Octatrack.
Probably also gets more use out of it than me, the lucky little geezer!
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My mother plays the bassoon, but she confiscated my OT when she heard the deep bass coming from it. Now I’m left confused: where’s the Midi input on this thing!?
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bassoon is cv only, I can understand your confusion.
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This thread and video: an oboe is about $10k, dies after 10 years if you play it a lot (holy shit), and guesstimate of 20,000/yr sold. https://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/xva1j1/why_oboes_are_so_expensive_they_have_a_5_year/
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I’m going to guess… 2,000 octatrack sold per year? Any they don’t die after ten years but they do kill some of their owners.
Maybe too high. 1,000 octatrack and 4,000 digitakt? I really have no idea. How many rc505? How many sp404? 10,000? 20,000? They have polished video adverts.
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Better track record than some of those synth clones (won’t name names), amirite?
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To further my tangent on the thread topic, anyone curious about bassoon in a non-classical context might enjoy the (relatively recently) late, great Daniel Smith the album Blue Bassoon.
It’s a total trip hearing bebop / standards with this gritty, not-quite-sax timbre.
Surely plenty of Octatrack fodder
within.
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I think elektron sales are doing better than what you assume
Thing is, there’s only about 500 musicians in New Orleans who each play ten gigs per night in different lineups.
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Ha!
Yeah, good point.
But that’s only accounting for the ones who’ve made it.
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Get yer money on the table! How many octatrack, digitakt, digitone, and model cycles in 2022?
syntakt is still number 1 in thomann drum machine sales. every time I look syntakt & DT are number 1 & 3
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have no clue but elektron is not a mom and pop company, it’s carried by guitar center. guitar center has 294 locations.
forget sweetwater, elektron direct sales, every other place that sells elektron devices - focus on guitar center.
you said 2000 octatrack. that would be less than 7 octatrack per guitar center per year. is that realistic, to you?
Put your own numbers on the table!
Store Locator | Elektron
there are 213 retailers on this list, some of them are chains. I don’t need to put down a number to know that 2000 units per year is an unrealistic figure. If I really cared I would email support and waste their time getting accurate numbers, it’s pointless to guess at how many are sold. even if all 213 only sold 10 each it would be 2130 and then if 294 guitar centers sold 10 each add an additional 2930 to that figure. I can’t even begin to guess at how much business sweetwater does. It’s an exercise in futility to even guess, that’s the point.
I think everyone knows the answer is … Wednesday.
Fun fact : In France the music synth market is somewhat similar in volume as the smoothing iron one…
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Just to make an educated guess: there are different sites saying things about Elektron’s financials, but the lowest number I could find was 54 employees and $11mil revenue.
Afaik most of their revenue is from devices sales. There are about 10 products in production, so if $1m of that is Octatrack that would amount to about 700/year. But that’s with the prices and share guess from today, I’d expect they sold more in the first years. But I’d be surprised if there are more than 20k units sold.
I think some YouTube stats can help us here. If you look at popular OT videos, esp tutorials, it’s a start.
I’d even say given all the factors, that the number of views of a popular OT tutorial could be close to the audience size.
Only a small percentage of OT owners would have watched a particular video (say 1 in 20), and on the other side people watch videos who have not purchased it, and people watch videos multiple times. Let’s say those balance out, just for conversation…
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