Audient owner and CEO Simon Blackwood has spoken exclusively to Headliner about how the company has grown its business over the past year, the state of the home recording market and pro audio market trends.
Despite the vast challenges posed by the pandemic, Audient has continued to expand its offering, breaking into new markets and adding consistently to its product portfolio. With the pre-Covid boom in home recording already in full swing, the past 12 months have seen the market grow exponentially, with many using their down time to develop their home and project studio set-ups.
Here, Blackwood takes us inside the latest trends shaping the industry and offers his take on what the future holds for the business...
How has business for Audient been impacted by the pandemic? What kind of trends have you been seeing?
Firstly, I’d like to express our ongoing concern for those in our wider industry who’ve been directly impacted by the pandemic – many have faced significant personal challenges, especially in the live performance market and I suspect the ‘new normal’ will sadly be normal for quite some time yet.
As for Audient, our iO business has grown exponentially over 2019-20 and the trend has continued well into 2021.
In some small way we hope we’ve helped musicians remain positive and creative. With today’s amazingly creative tools, making and releasing music has never been so easy or affordable and with our iD and EVO product lines we’re very much part of that.
We found significant acceptance in the new markets that opened up with the pandemic and with the astonishing acceptance of our EVO platform concept, the days of low cost being low quality have long gone.
Our large format ASP console business has been challenged a bit as our core market of Music Tech Education moved rapidly online with restricted campus attendance by students, resulting in the consequential suspension of expansion and upgrade budgets.
However, our UK manufacturing facility remained busy as we serve a wide global market and as we’re best value in the market segment,we won business where budgets got pressed and indeed, we’ve supported a lot of preventative service maintenance of consoles that are over 20 years old that are in daily use with students.
Over recent months we’ve seen a return to more normal levels of business as confidence returns, indeed we’ve recently launched our console “Back on Track” multifaceted campaign to help campus budget holders, engineers and producers position themselves to be at the forefront of the market reawakening.
We’ve also embraced new ways to connect with our current and potential customer base through online technology – it’s immediacy and interaction are things to behold and yields high quality data that feeds back into all aspects of our business.We’ve easily accepted that the old way of doing things is just that…and I’d like to pay tribute to the Audient team in the way they’ve embraced the new ways of working,in connecting with our customers and with ourselves as we’re now located throughout the world in different time zones …. we hired quite a few new team members and the onboarding process was a tad surreal but it all seemed to work well.
I think we’ve seen a rapid acceleration of changes that were already happening in all aspects of business. We’re lucky to be a part of an amazing industry transformation.
What kind of impact has lockdown had on the home recording market?
A massive expansion in what was already a growing market place though in these days of mobile recording and 5G it may well be we have to redefine what the home recording market actually is… who’d have thought you could get an idea instantly tracked into your phone’s DAW using online instruments and then interact with near zero latency with a collaborator on the other side of the planet - all from your phone’s touch screen.
Have you seen any specific ranges performing particularly well during this time?
I think you might have already guessed… our EVO product line was launched just before things went crazy. The EVO platform was conceived pre-pandemic and we had decided to rip up the 2-2 interface playbook and deliver something really innovative through technology with features like Smartgain to resolve gain structure,the EVO Control app and allowing control of EVO from within Logic, proper and simplified loopback control, all to assist new users in getting instant gratification, reasoning that new users attention span is short and that we’re competing for their time with many other activities, so EVO had to deliver from the first chord/vocal take.
As the realities of Covid became apparent, the features that made EVO so compelling to the music creation market became instantly applicable to the new markets that arose with Covid.