Shure vice president of global sales, pro audio, Peter James, has spoken exclusively to Headliner about how the company’s pro audio division has been serving the market of late, the business trends shaping the industry and how it has been helping to facilitate a “renaissance of artistic output and creativity”.
In many ways, few companies in the pro audio market could have been as well prepared for events of the past couple of years as Shure. For the past decade, the company has not just pivoted from its position as a leading manufacturer of trusty microphones, but completely reinvented itself as an all-round provider of high-end pro audio solutions. Its wireless technology has rendered it as a major force in the world of integrated systems and the conferencing sector with products like Axient Digital, while the launch of products like TwinPlex, DuraPlex and Motiv microphones have seen Shure grow its visibility further still in the worlds of theatre, sport, broadcast and, perhaps most pertinently, remote work and connectivity.
To find out about how the company is serving those in the business of pro audio, content creation and remote working, we joined James over a Zoom call for a chat about the state of the market and what the future holds for both Shure and the industry as a whole...
How have the past 18 months been for Shure and its pro audio division?
If I look back to March 2020, we started off optimistic that we would slow down for a few months and come back in the summer. Of course, we’re still feeling the effects of the pandemic today. But as a company, we’ve continued to adapt to the changes and are always working with customers to understand their challenges and support them the best we can.
For pro audio, it’s business as usual. Our focus is on supporting customers and everyone who uses our products - that hasn’t changed. There are always challenges, and the unique needs of the creative industry are constant. Whilst Covid has had this huge impact on the industry it hasn’t changed the reality of what we work with. There is still plenty of creative output and artistic expression, and we want to get that out there. There has been a renaissance of artistic output and creativity and we’ve had to find ways to help people get that out to the market.
There have been lots of challenges; things that have blown my mind but demonstrate where we are at with customers. One that springs to mind was a project that involved one of our clients wanting to entertain a large group of people with a wine tasting event. Of course, that’s totally not Covid safe, so how do you take a large group of people, bring them together in a fun way and socially distance them while sharing wine? So, what we did was put people on a Ferris wheel in individual pods with the wine. But how do you make that engaging for people? Well, what we came up with was a solution whereby people could talk to one another in each cabin, and it became a well fuelled entertainment experience that was also socially distanced. It was great to come up with creative ways to help people like that.
We also worked with a US TV production to find a way to do script read throughs. Again, how do you bring these famous people, who want to stay safe, together in a socially distanced way while collaborating? It’s about finding ways to be valuable.
It must be heartening to see how the pro audio community has remained so creative and continued to innovate through these difficult times?
It’s been amazing. The most visible aspects of pro audio, such as live events, have endured really tough times and it’s something they’ll hopefully never experience again. But the sector is about entertainment, and the void left by the lack of mass gatherings has been filled with things like streaming in its various forms, and things like that depend heavily on products where Shure has been a leader for nearly a century now. We design, engineer and manufacture products for mission critical applications, and while the missions may have changed a little bit, the expectation that these products cannot fail still remains. And you could argue that the audience has gotten bigger. When you go to streaming, the potential audience is not 50,000 people in a stadium, it could be 5,000,000 people, so it’s even more critical in some respects.
Are you starting to see traces of normality return to the market?
Market conditions are certainly improving, although the pace of recovery around the world is varying enormously. But we are seeing strong signs. There are now shows running; I was lucky enough to be in the States recently on Broadway and it felt to some degree normal. It was a full house, great show, so there was a sense of normality, but we are still compromised. There are some restrictions in place, but the signs of recovery are there.
