Re: Looper development and production costs?

["Barry M" <mccokinya@hotmail.com>]

Kim,
I think your numbers are pessimistic for the bigger players who's products 
populate the music store shelves. The DL4 is sold in Guitar Center, Mars, 
Musicians Friend not to mention other online etailers and a lot of smaller 
music shops.  Guitar Center alone must have more than 70 stores. They seem 
to have two in every city. I think guitar center has to sell at least 70 a 
month of DL4s. Isn't volume discount there schtick? That's 840 a year just 
for guitar center. That's just the US. Let's assume that the rest of the 
music shops in the US all together sell as much as Guitar Center. That's 
1680 just in the US. What about the rest of the world? Let us assume that 
number equals the US. Then that is a total of 3360 units in a year.  I 
think 
line 6 probably sells more than that. It seems to me that the equation 
would 
be; the better the distribution, the bigger the brand name, the cheaper 
the 
price, the more units sold.

I think looping is moving out of  the shadows and into the lime light. 
There 
seems to be a lot of new hardware and software loopers popping up. It's 
becoming a standard feature in DAWs. The growing global popularity of 
"dance 
music" and it's many strains is also doing wonders for loop based music. 
There must be something going on. In the last year alone Roland, Electrix 
and Redsound all popped one out.
Sure it will be a another trend but quality trends turn into mainstays. 
Look 
at jeans or Ray Bans. Let's just hope it's not like the Cher Auto Tune/ 
vocoder voice effect...make it stop.

Of course that's just my opinion...I could be wrong. - Dennis Miller

>- In the niches of the musical instrument industry, I would consider
>selling 1000 units in a year to be quite a big success for mid-range rack
>mount stuff. Most things probably won't sell that well. Sustaining that 
>for
>several years is not likely. Your 2000 unit/year number would be a smash
>hit, probably beyond the realistic size of the looper market at this time.


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