Native Instruments CEO Nick Williams announced today that they – along with iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx – are being acquired by inMusic:
“To our friends, artists, partners, collaborators, and community:
After three months of hard work, and three months of extraordinary loyalty from you, I am pleased to share that a definitive agreement has now been signed for Native Instruments to be acquired by inMusic.
Two iconic music technology companies, with decades of shared respect for this industry and the people who make music in it, are coming together to build something greater than either could alone. Our NKS hardware and MPC Editions collaboration last year was the beginning of this story. Today, we look ahead to a common future.
inMusic has spent three decades building and growing the brands that creators rely on every day — Akai Professional, Moog Music, Denon DJ, Numark, Rane, M-Audio and more. They understand what it means to build tools that musicians love. And they understand what Native Instruments means to our customers and community.”
This dramatically expands the inMusic family of companies, which already includes Akai, Alesis, Denon, M-Audio, Moog, Numark, Rane and others.
What does this mean for the future of Native Instruments, iZotope, Plugin Alliance, & Brainworx?
For the near term, it sounds like it will be business as usual.
“Our commitment is simple: continued investment across all brands and product lines, and a long-term focus on innovation that serves creators at every level,” notes Jack O’Donnell, CEO of inMusic. “The tools you rely on today will keep working, and the tools you will rely on tomorrow are actively being built.”
The acquisition is expected to be completed within a few weeks.
Here is a value judgement: Jack O’Donnell is not a good person. I recognise that is a judgement afterall, but it is one formed over time by those of us who have worked in this industry; through hearsay, second-hand accounts, observed patterns, and the downstream consequences of his conduct.
It is also notable that someone who has long criticised industry consolidation, except of course when it aligns with his own acquisition interests, and now he is continually building a growing conglomerate. Whilst this may offer short-term stability for distressed brands, the longer-term effect is less favourable for consumers: fewer independent players, tighter pricing power, and reduced choice.
That makes the role of smaller independent makers all the more important, and it is vital that musicians actively support them. At the same time, independent makers themselves should focus on durable value creation rather than short-term margin extraction, or they risk replicating the same cycle they claim to oppose.
Just my two pence and quite possibly generously valued at that.
The question isn’t whether he’s a nice guy, but whether he’s a smart businessman that can keep these brands alive.
Roger Linn famously called O’Donnell “a bastard”. But Linn also recently came around and praised Akai for keeping the MPC alive. Linn even reviewed the MPC Live 2 and said that the company did a great job of honoring his design and keeping it relevant.
All of the OG ‘nice guy’ synth designers went out of business in the ’70s.
Thanks to O’Donnel and inMusic, companies like Akai and Moog are still making cool gear. They’d be bankrupt, otherwise.
I believe your reply leans heavily on retrospective justification while avoiding the actual criticism being raised. No one denied that O’Donnell is commercially competent. The point was about character, conduct, contradictions, and the long-term consequences of consolidation. “He keeps brands alive” does not magically invalidate those concerns.
You also present an extremely simplistic binary: either inMusic acquires these companies or they vanish into the abyss. That is not how restructuring works. Companies can be recapitalised, downsized, privately restructured, licensed, acquired by specialist operators, or reorganised under entirely different ownership models. A conglomerate absorbing them is merely one possible outcome, not some inevitable act of salvation.
More importantly, preserving a trademark is not the same thing as preserving a company’s soul. A logo continuing to exist on products manufactured under a larger holding group does not necessarily mean the original engineering culture, innovation ethos, quality standards, or creative independence survive intact. Many musicians care about more than whether the badge still exists on a box.
Your Roger Linn example is also doing far less work than you imply. Linn complimenting aspects of the MPC’s modern implementation is not equivalent to endorsing O’Donnell’s broader behaviour, acquisition strategy, market influence, or business ethics. Those are entirely separate discussions.
Likewise, “all the nice guy synth designers went bankrupt” is such a cartoonishly reductive reading of synthesiser history that it barely survives scrutiny. Many early firms collapsed because of global competition, changing markets, manufacturing economics, poor scaling, macroeconomic conditions, distribution failures, and technological transitions — not because they lacked ruthlessness.
And there is a deeper irony here. O’Donnell spent years rhetorically criticising aspects of corporate consolidation while steadily building one of the industry’s largest consolidating entities himself. Apparently consolidation is dangerous right up until the moment one personally benefits from it.
You also frame survival itself as the ultimate metric of success. It is not. A highly consolidated market often produces exactly what musicians complain about: homogenisation, reduced experimentation, tighter pricing power, weaker repairability, diminished competition, and increasingly financialised decision-making. Independent manufacturers matter precisely because they are often willing to pursue ideas that conglomerates deem commercially inefficient.
So yes, some brands may well have disappeared without acquisition. That still does not automatically make every acquisition beneficial, healthy, or beyond criticism. “At least the logo survived” is an extraordinarily low bar by which to judge the long-term health of an industry.
Nice! I use Chat GPT to help write my posts too.
Nailed it.
You don’t need Jack O’Donnell to keep the MPC concept alive. If Jack & his conglomerate go belly-up, someone else will take up the MPC concept.
I’m sure Roger Linn still has some concept drawings of a modernized MPC in his own drawer somewhere!
You need a company like Akai/inMusic, though, to be able to create a modern MPC and manufacture it at a price people will buy.
No criticism of Roger Linn, he’s working as an indie developer and can’t compete with the scale of an Akai. It took Akai to come up with the MPC Sample, which a lot of people are excited to get. I don’t think an indie developer could tackle a project that big or make it that affordably.
Just IMO, NI’s newer instruments are sometimes interesting, but not world-beaters. Setting aside everything else, the company has become as much a giant library as not. I can’t recall feeling inspired by NI anymore. Instead, I mistrust the company’s bad behaviors.
I’m deeply tired of people in business choosing to be bastards. Too much of that stink sullies the products. I sure don’t see long lines waiting to buy a Cybertruck. A reviewer said calling it a utility vehicle was like defining falling down the stairs as exercise. 😛
I’ll gladly keep playing instruments from the numerous smaller shops who simply deliver without all the drama. No matter where you come from musically, there are great options in every category. Tip of the hat to AAS, Spectrasonics, TAL & Cherry Audio.
….Cybertruck. A reviewer said calling it a utility vehicle was like defining falling down the stairs as exercise.
I literally sprayed my tea on my laptop and laugh-coughed uncontrollably…well done sir, well done!
i think In Music has done a great job with the companies they have acquired, Akai is absolutely crushing it, and IMO the Moog Muse was the synth they always needed to make. IMO NI is in great hands.
Looking forward to MPC / Machine integration. Maybe they’ll do something interesting like a MPC maschine. Machine was great but has been dead for years. Last “upgrade” a joke – literally felt kinda robbed after “upgrading” should have been advertised as a dark theme w higher resolution skin.
I hope they come up with hacky wacky interesting things like a groovebox with Roli Seaboard pad things, Moog filters and Maschine workflow lol
What I find kind of hilarious is all the DJ stuff they own now lol Remember that Simpsons episode about the Duff beer factory and how all flavors came from the same pipe?
But, as always, if you dont like this simply vote with your wallet.