Andrew Aversa

Right. Our store does not have any way to automatically connect to any other stores to retrieve that data as we're on different systems. That being said, one purpose of the VIP system is to reward purchases on our site vs. distributors where we do not get the full sale amount. Other sites may have their own loyalty systems in place, but we generally want people to shop at our site 🙂

The threshold for VIP is specifically 3+ orders totaling $300 or more - if you've passed that and didn't get an email, just reach out to our support and we'll investigate. Sometimes people check out as guests or use an alternate email so their purchases aren't all in the same account. We can easily re-assign and move things.

Hey folks, while I do appreciate the fun of bargain hunting, @kitekrazy put it best that it's ultimately not a good customer experience. Nobody should feel like they are "missing out" on a discount just because they don't know where to look. That's why earlier this year we introduced the Personalized Deals area of the site. It's intended to REPLACE the need and hassle of finding/using coupons. The discounts you see are directly based on your existing purchase history. Like if you have a Shreddage 3 guitar, you'll see discounts on the other guitars. And the more items you own, the better your discounts. You simply check what you want and hit Add to Cart at the bottom. It's as easy as possible Plus, just in the last couple weeks, we updated this system so that if you buy multiple deals from this page, it will give you a sort of "create your own bundle" discount with some extra % off. Again, it applies evenly to everyone, no special codes are necessary. Putting this system together took quite a lot of time, but I think it's the ideal combination of easy-to-use and fair, as any two people with the same purchase history will get the exact same discounts. Naturally, when we implemented this, we expired/deprecated the vast majority of coupons in our system... But clearly, we missed some, like the ones mentioned here (which have been disabled as they were not intended to be available.) Again, everything is supposed to be 'ported' to the Deals system. Any previous crossgrades, upgrades, add-ons, etc, are now all deals. I'm going to take some time today for another pass and make sure I have not missed anything else. It might be a little less fun, but the Personalized Deals area really is more fair to everyone.

My company has made no attack on 8dio. That statement is itself false and, to use your words, defamatory. Again, for the public record, Sarah has been working for us since before that thread was even started. Things only took a negative turn when Troels himself joined it - over 6 months later - and other individuals shared their experiences with 8dio. It's as simple as that. As for my sole post, which did not mention 8dio or its products at all, again, you're welcome to that opinion that it's unethical. I leave it for anyone else to form their own opinion. I didn't hide anything and in fact specifically confirmed that she works for us, in response to someone bringing up my company. As for Mario, he is employed by Native Instruments and does limited part-time hourly work for us. If you believe there is a conflict of interest I'm surprised that you aren't posting in various threads on this forum telling people not to buy Native Instruments products - as he does far more work for them!

"Your employee/contractor, Sarah Mancuso, took her VI-Control thread sharing her fan project scripts for an 8Dio library and showering praise on 8Dio libraries -- made prior to her employment with Impact Soundworks, an 8Dio competitor -- and transformed it into at a defamatory attack thread after 8Dio didn't buy her scripts and she began employment with ISW." That would be interesting if it were true, which it isn't. Go back and look. The tenor of that thread changed because of an exchange between Troels and Sarah in April 2022. You can go see it for yourself - it's all public record. We hired Sarah as a contactor way back in October 2021, before she even started the thread! And prior to that, she had done beta testing for us, including paid testing, going back to 2018, well-before she even started the Adachi project at all. And let me clarify that I have no issue with Sarah or Mario sharing their personal opinions or experiences. That includes praising products developed by other companies... which Sarah did.. for months/years. "Mario / Evil Dragon who also hid / failed to disclose his employment with ISW, while making a series of defamatory attacks against an ISW competitor." First, Mario is employed by Native Instruments. He does limited, part-time, hourly work for us. (Which of course I'm grateful for, because he's awesome.) He has also contributed to work from many other companies. If you think for some reason this reflects poorly on me or my company, why not apply the same standard to Native Instruments or any other company he's worked for...? I don't believe he (or I) "hid" this any more than he "hid" the fact that he works for NI. It wasn't relevant to whatever he was posting at the time. Not to mention he's one of the oldest contributors to VI-Control and KVR , with probably 20 years of posting history. If this were a situation where a new poster randomly showed up, posted a negative opinion and vanished - and then it turned out they worked for us - I agree that would be suspect and unethical. That wasn't the case here. Mario is a pillar of the Kontakt, plugin, and virtual instrument community. He's well-known and well-respected. "When you later joined the thread attacking your competitor,..." When did I do that? I don't believe I've ever made any public comments about 8dio or any of its products. Literally, my one and only post was confirming that Sarah works for us. I took the opportunity to praise her work further, because she does great work.

Just to clarify the record, as @PavlovsCat keeps talking about/insulting me for whatever reason... here is my one and only post in the thread to which he is referring. A post where I am literally saying that Sarah works for us, in response to a comment specifically about how she works for us. I leave it to anyone reading this as to whether you think this is somehow "unethical".

Hi, owner of Impact Soundworks here - you've invoked me/ISW many times in the last month or so here, and I'm genuinely confused... what specific thing do you think I (or we) have done that is "indefensibly bad" / unethical?

If we had no overhead per product this would be true, but depending on the purchase, it may be a loss for us. For example, we pay a per-unit serial cost for any Kontakt Player product, which scales to MSRP and not the discounted price; we have royalty arrangements on various products including the Tokyo Scoring series, so that the musicians are compensated for every sale; we pay for bandwidth used (which isn't trivial on 60gb+ downloads!); we also pay a % of MSRP for product delivery when using Pulse. So why did we do it then? One of our core company values is being honest and straightforward so I'll explain the context and thinking behind this deal. The majority of people on our email list are folks who downloaded a free instrument like Shreddage 3 Stratus Free or Super Audio Boy, but have not purchased anything. Our observation is that these free customers typically take years to become paid customers, and a minority of them EVER do, which makes sense... I've downloaded free plugins and not purchased other plugins from that developer's catalog. But we also noticed that even if someone took years to go from free -> paid product, they typically became lifelong customers, which is reassuring because we put a lot of time & effort into our instruments (and their updates.) Hence why we aimed to offer this deal. IF we had the opportunity to reach these folks when they were leaving, maybe we'd have one more chance to show them the value of our instruments. We do not inflate our list prices. In fact, when we released Shreddage 2 back in 2012 it was $149. Most of our modern Shreddage 3 instruments are still that price over a decade later despite many free updates and improvements. If you look across our catalog, our prices are middle-of-the-road relative to industry peers. You will certainly find more expensive amp sims, tape sims, virtual guitars, virtual basses, orchestral strings, etc. elsewhere. We also intentionally do not run frequent (or deep) sales/flash sales because we don't want to partake in the kind of behavior you're describing, where we list something at $300 but try to make all of our sales at, say, $200. This is different than some other companies in the industry who seem to do monthly or even weekly sales and deep discounts on large swathes of their catalog. Our internal sales reports reflect this approach - the majority of sales of any given product are at list price. I think we also put quite a bit into maintaining and improving our software. This year alone we've published dozens of free updates, including some for products over 5 years old. There are customers who purchased from us when we first launched back in 2007 (imagine that - before the smartphone era!) whom we still support and provide free updates to. I'm proud of that. Anecdotally as someone who has been buying software since 2004, more than half of what I've purchased over a decade ago is either unavailable or not updated.

I'm going to repost this from the other thread... Hey guys - owner of ISW here. This is abusing our system. Period. This year and the last have been difficult for us with a general pullback across the music gear industry in demand. We've implemented various discounts for our customers as a gesture of a good will and to help people enjoy our instruments through rocky economic times. At the same time, despite that pullback in demand, we've created new jobs (with benefits) in the last 2 years and I'm personally committed to avoiding layoffs at all costs. In 2022 I took a 75% pay cut to ensure the well-being of my employees. Because of the behavior here, we have to disable multiple discounts entirely, so nobody will get them, and we may have to disable others as well. I'll now have to spend my time (currently on my one vacation I get per year) and money researching how to solve a problem that folks here created. These are resources that could have been spent on product updates or developing new instruments, that we now have to spend preventing abuse. Please think about your actions next time you do something like this to a tiny business like us.

Hey guys - owner of ISW here. This is abusing our system. Period. This year and the last have been difficult for us with a general pullback across the music gear industry in demand. We've implemented various discounts for our customers as a gesture of a good will and to help people enjoy our instruments through rocky economic times. At the same time, despite that pullback in demand, we've created new jobs (with benefits) in the last 2 years and I'm personally committed to avoiding layoffs at all costs. In 2022 I took a 75% pay cut to ensure the well-being of my employees. Because of the behavior here, we have to disable this discount entirely, so nobody will get it, and we may have to disable others as well. I'll now have to spend my time (currently on my one vacation I get per year) and money researching how to solve a problem that folks here created. These are resources that could have been spent on product updates or developing new instruments, that we now have to spend preventing abuse. Please think about your actions next time you do something like this to a tiny business like us.