Five Things I Learned at Winter NAMM 2015

Another Winter NAMM is in the books. The cymbals have crashed, the LEDs have flashed, several checks have been cashed, fretboard fingers mashed, cookies cached (didn’t see that one coming, did you?), snare drums bashed, hotel rooms trashed, et cetera. You get the idea. But what the long plane rides home offer is an opportunity for is reflection on what just took place. Here are five takeaways one writer took back from Anaheim.

• Speakers – five years or so ago NAMM was a winter wonderland of boutique microphones. Scores of them, ranging from pricey and stylish evocations of classic German transducers to utilitarian USB models that worked with iPhone podcasts and survived falling into bowls of dorm room Ramen noodles. This year, the focus had shifted to the other analog end of the wire: the loudspeaker. In January, in numbers that rivaled and likely exceeded the microphone frenzy of a few years ago, speakers were all over the place. There were the new entries from OEM providers like JBL and B&C, and tons of new PA products, especially portable PAs, like those from Electro-Voice (EKX Series), Yamaha (CBR Series) and Yorkville (EXM400). As performance stages appear in places you never saw them before, to host the surge of Ed Sheeran knock-offs and hipster duos of a scaled-back music biz, the portable, personal, wireless PA system will be a major product category to watch this year.

• Free (or close to it) – Avid’s announcement of Pro Tools First, a free version of its industry-standard Pro Tools recording platform, was much more quietly matched by Apple’s price drop for its latest version of Logic down to $199. And Logic now can scale seamlessly down into Apple’s Garageband, which comes loaded for free on most Apple laptop and desktop computers. As more music moves into a software-based model, prices will do what they do everywhere else that software rules: they will go down. Music’s become increasingly free, like it or not; making it, at least to some extent, is inevitably headed down the same road. But as a corollary to that, at a time when YouTube is the Johnny Appleseed of music instruction, apps – most of which are free or cost so little they are virtually free – have become the saplings, offering little upfront for retailers but sparking enormous interest in new instruments and other items that will translate into future sales.

• The pro’s from Dover have arrived – Pro audio was plenty evident at the show, with nearly 300 qualified pro audio exhibitors, according to one source’s reading of NAMM’s unfiltered pro-audio exhibitor spreadsheet. The TEC Awards – the Grammy Awards for the soldering-iron set – abandoned their long-time AES Show slot three years ago for Winter NAMM, and that’s all the real signal anyone should need: recording music is now inextricably intertwined with playing it, learning it, teaching it, performing it and writing it. There is no real wall between the two domains anymore.

• Jump into the net – Not just pro audio but all audio is moving towards a networked paradigm. Networked audio has been around for a quarter of a century but has been limited to commercial environments like broadcast. But in the last several years the number of options and markets for it has markedly increased, most notably in live sound, such as Turbosound’s UltraNet or Harman’s HiQNet. The market leader in the category, the Dante networking platform from Australia-based Audinate, was walking the show in advance of the release later this year of Dante Via, a software bridge that turns any PC into a networked device, without the need to buy any Dante-enabled devices. It might seem far beyond the realm of MI at the moment, but MIDI seemed that way once, too. (Mackie announced a Dante card for its DL32R wirelessly controlled digital live sound mixer at the show.)

• The elephant in the room – didn’t happen at NAMM, but rumors were flying there and they turned into actual news barely two weeks later, when new C-suite management at Guitar Center eviscerated the much of company’s middle management tier and rearranged the flowchart for their pro audio arm, GC Professional. Guitar Center’s travails have been a lesson in progress, but it’s too soon to read the end-of-chapter summary. Is big-box retailing a dead end for the MI business? Probably. Is 10-figure debt dangerous? Definitely.