Where did you get those bassoon samples?
From the Beethoven contrabassoon video! Thanks to this thread I’ve learned that the contrabassoon is the richest harmonic oscillator on earth. Electricity continues to fall short of wood and metal and air. There’s a note at the end that’s just nasty
5 Likes
I feel dumber after reading this thread.
3 Likes
2,000 paying chompi buyers
downvote.
Checkout my dawless oboe reaction video
“insert rick roll link here”
2 Likes
2 Likes
I have no idea how many octatracks there are in circulation though I would not be shocked if it gets to 7 figures, just because it is internationally sold by the biggest retailers and has been for a decade.
What I do know, is that the number of Electronic Music producers has been rising continuously over the past ~30 years. Many kids that used to get an electric guitar and an amp for their 15th birthday now get a laptop/software/interface/monitors package or a dj mixer, et Voila! a bedroom producer is born.
Guitar music (rock) and classical (bassoon) are becoming more and more niche. Mainstream pop, which is not recognized in these circles as “Electronic Music” is mostly just that with pop structures and a catchy lead vocal.
Judging by the number and the rate of hardware product releases aimed directly at electronic music producers it must be an industry grossing hundreds of millions of US$ every year. Add in the ITB crowd and we are talking many millions of people.
2 Likes
The PSU always gives them away
Here are some actual Elektron financials from the last 3 years:
https://www.largestcompanies.com/company/285824/closing-figures-and-key-ratios
Not super detailed but provides some insight into yearly sales totals, etc.
Might be useful for the speculation / guesstimation…
2 Likes
Sales figures are anyway biased by the people who bought/sold/re-bought the OT number of times 
Same goes for bassoons if they die every 10 years.
Oh nice. Ok so some here will accidentally have become accountants in their dayjob and will know better than me how to read these. But if that’s 14m turnover, and turnover = revenue, then allowing for vat and retailer markup and maybe the cheaper devices sell more that’s maybe… 20-30,000 devices sold each year. Others will have preferred ways of guessing what proportion of that total can be attributed to each device. I’m going to guess wildly that they sell 5,000 octatracks a year, but maybe more in the past. So 50-100,000 octatracks roaming the world. Which is one hell of a big number for such a bastard difficult device. I’m impressed once again by humanity’s resilience and determination to make music.
Yeah I would agree with this. I think there’s both social and financial stuff at play here that will be impacting the bottom line of companies (no idea what this is worth financially mind you.)
Socially, we’ve moved from a time when music was a tribal, “belong or be gone” culture. Back in the 90s it was a badge of honour to be part of a specific tribe, and even more so to be in a band that was part of a scene. Computers used to be expensive and slow, so while people definitley had access to them and there was a thriving DJ & electronic music scene - it was (comparitively) easy and cheap to get an instrument and get involved in a band because of low prices and high interest in it.
These days it’s different culturally and financially. I remember that guy Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, and when he came out loads of people said he wasn’t a real musician because he used a laptop and had no band. But that attitude has all but disappeared now. And with people getting used to a more distant/digital life in some cases, with more online interaction, the mysterious lone wolf (see Burial, Four Tet etc) has become more of a sign of the times than bods on stage in a band.
Financially as well, it’s gone in a different direction. A computer wasnt always a given, where now it’s often seen as an essential for people to have. So people almost discount that from their production buy. And if you do that, you don’t have to spend a huge amount on actual gear. For the price of a decent electric guitar & amp, you get a limitless canvas inside a DAW where you can have your machine be a symphonic orchestra one minute and then doing minimal techno the next. I think a lot of people are excited by this, and if I were starting out today, this is where I’d be starting just because it makes sense financially - and because it fits with the moment in time we’re in.
This isn’t so much about the actual numbers (which I’m fairly convinced will be going up), but a ramble on why more people are headed over that way maybe.
The Digi / Samples product lines probably make up the large majority of Elektron’s sales. I’d be surprised they sell more than 2,000 Octatracks a year. That box is a niche within a niche within a niche.
1 Like