What do the worlds of music tech, veterinary medicine and funeral planning have in common? The answer is that they’ve all become hot property with venture capital and private equity firms. This is partly a generational phenomenon: the musos who turned their attention to building mixers in 1975 are now understandably ready to cash out. It’s partly because Wall Street and the City of London have a nose for an underexploited opportunity. And it’s partly because capital investment is actually necessary for development and growth.
Such investment naturally comes with high expectations, and there have already been some high‑profile cases where music tech firms haven’t been able to deliver the results expected by their backers. It also tends to lead to a change of company culture. The eccentrics and mavericks who populated the trade show floors of the ’80s and ’90s are fading from the scene. The larger a music tech business grows, and the more the purse strings are held by people with backgrounds outside the industry, the less room there is for genuine individuality.
Behind even the largest and blandest of mass‑market manufacturers will be a team of extremely clever, highly dedicated designers.
But whatever changes are taking place at the top, it remains true that the people who design and build the equipment are passionate about their jobs. It’s easy to picture the industry as being divided into mad geniuses soldering by hand in their garden sheds, and soulless corporate entities whose creative impulses are only focused on cutting costs. In reality, successful ‘boutique’ companies tend to have a very strong business vision to match their design chops. And behind even the largest and blandest of mass‑market manufacturers will be a team of extremely clever, highly dedicated designers.
No‑one goes into building musical equipment for the money. Someone with the skill set to code interface drivers, optimise PCB layouts or squeeze an extra dB of dynamic range out of an A‑D chip could almost certainly earn more doing something else. But, luckily for us, these people choose to make music gear. Perhaps they fall into it by accident. Perhaps they’re attracted by the reflected glory of making equipment that gets used by famous people. Probably they enjoy working in a small field where everyone knows everyone else, and rivalries are usually friendly rather than deadly. And, most likely, they’re musicians and engineers themselves. They want to build a better mousetrap because they have their own mice to catch.
Focusrite, for example, are a publicly listed company with several hundred employees. But you have only to talk to their design team to realise how significant this month’s cover product is to them. The investment that has gone into the development of the ISA C8X isn’t just financial. It’s personal — and it shows.
Sam Inglis Editor In Chief