Q. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and work history?
AC: I have a beautiful wife and two kids growing up fast. Live in Wellfleet, in the National Seashore on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Lucky enough to work remotely. Currently, I am the VP of Sales at Acoustica and VP of Business Development at Acoustica’s sister-company, Cherry Audio. We are a small team of MI veterans (from Cakewalk, Sonic Foundry, Dr. T’s, Bias and Keyboard Magazine) who are truly passionate about music and what we do. Working in the MI software industry for several decades, my 1st gig was as a sales person at Dr. T’s Music Software. In the late 80’s/early 90’s, music software was developed mainly for the Atari, Amiga, Commodore 64 and Apple computers, and, most of our sales were into Europe. We were shipping a ton of boxes (when XCHANGE Market was just a twinkle in Ray’s eye! ☺); MIDI sequencers, patch editors and notation software, mostly to Germany and England. The US market and PC platform were just beginning to grow.
Q. What was it like back in the days when Ray and you were competitors?
AC: Little did I l know that down the street from where I lived (Watertown, MA), TwelveTone Systems opened up an office. As the PC market began to grow, I took a job at TwelveTone Systems, developers of Cakewalk. At that time in the early 90’s, Cakewalk was a MIDI sequencer, and the developers were looking to become the 1st fully integrated Audio/MIDI DAW on the planet. Not sure officially, but I believe that Cakewalk was the 1st to release a DAW that synced Audio/MIDI. Soon thereafter, the market absolutely exploded. Then only a 14-store chain, Guitar Center buyer, Paul Allec (still there today I believe), contacted us to pick up Cakewalk, and the rest is history. Sam Ash, Sweetwater, Musician’s Friend, Long and McQuade and hundreds of other US and Canadian MI shops followed.
I believe Ray was running Steinberg-NA and they were a force to be reckoned with. Cubase was beginning to show up everywhere. Early on, we knew that Ray and his team were serious competitors and they had our total respect for what they were accomplishing. Looking for new ways to grow the market, TwelveTone Systems did an OEM bundle deal with Creative Labs to include Cakewalk Apprentice in the SoundBlaster. The deal added over one million users of Cakewalk and introduced the consumer channel to music software. The business grew by the millions with the release of a stand-alone entry level app, Cakewalk Home Studio, which was sold into big box retailers like Best Buy, Comp USA, Circuit City, Radio Shack, Computer City, Office Depot, Egghead, Electronic Boutique, Fry’s, Target, Walmart and many others. This was truly the renaissance era of music software.
Q. I love travelling and I’ve read in your company site that you love travelling too, any favorite places that you’ve been to (hopefully not recently though)?
AC: With the music software market in super-growth mode, major MI companies started buying up the music software companies (Cakewalk by Roland, Steinberg by Yamaha, Sonic Foundry by Sony and so on…). I had the great fortune to meet and become friends with Mr. Kakahashi visiting Japan frequently. To train and set up distribution at all the Roland worldwide divisions, my travels took me to Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and nearly every country in Europe. My favorite place was Barcelona, Spain. I had a weekend off, so I took a walk down Ramblas Street. It was such a blast. At the end of the street I ran into the soccer stadium and took in a Barcelona FC vs Villarreal La Liga match. Totally awesome!
Q. Where did you first hear about XCHANGE?
AC: Seeing the value of digital distribution and the direction of the industry, Acoustica was working with XCHANGE Market from the very beginning. Acoustica was one of the 1st vendors to sign up and were beta testers.
Q. What has been your experience working with XCHANGE?
AC: The XCHANGE Market experience has been transformative for both our companies. Ray and XCHANGE Market saw the digital distribution opportunity before anyone (except for Waves maybe) listened to resellers/vendors and put together a great team of technical, marketing and sales people who are very responsive and hard working. Thanks to the XCHANGE Market, we save thousands of dollars annually not having to design, manufacture and ship boxes.
Q. How do you manage your Resellers?
AC: After my morning coffee of course, the 1st task I do every day is go to the XCHANGE portal, accept new reseller requests, invite new resellers to sign up, and generate the daily sales report to send to our A/P department. Once a reseller is signed up, we add them to our e-mail list to keep them informed on new product releases, updates and promotions.
Q. Do you work with Dealers outside of North America? How is that going?
AC: Yes, we have some very nice resellers outside of the US. While the business is not as big as our US business, we have found for example, that Cherry Audio’s Voltage Modular brand is becoming quite popular in Europe. Thomann is fast becoming a very consistent reseller for us.
Q. Have you made use of the Promotion Page?
AC: Yes, absolutely. We use the promotion page for all the main holiday promotions. It is a great tool with a lot of flexibility for me to use to set up the promo for all or select resellers and products. We can run a worldwide Black Friday offer. Or, we can run an exclusive reseller promo for select resellers who are willing to promote our offers through email newsletters and social media campaigns.
Q. Have you reviewed the recent changes in the Vendor portal? If so which changes have you found most useful?
AC: Yes I have. The UI updates look great and the new features offer great functionality. Also, the sales reporting is vastly improved and streamlined.
Q. What are features would you like to add to help manage your XCHANGE business?
AC: New features? Thank you for the inquiry, but seriously, as it stands now, the XCHANGE Market portal does everything we need it to do.
Q. Tell me a bit about Cherry Audio. How did that evolve?
AC: Cherry Audio is the sister company of Acoustica. Acoustica and Cherry Audio CTO, Dan Goldstein, is an avid hardware modular synth collector. I am told that his modular synth collection is perhaps one of the largest in the US. Dan has wanted to create Voltage Modular for over a decade. With the DAW market becoming more competitive in recent years (Logic price reduction, entry level DAW’s being given away for free…), the time was right to let Dan and his team of passionate modular synth enthusiasts get to work. Voltage Modular now has over 100,000 users. Voltage Modular is not just a modular synth, it is a platform. With the Voltage Modular Designer software, 3rd party developers like PSP Audioware and many others are creating new modules to use with Voltage Modular. There are now over 200 modules available for VM users.
Q. Have you done any work with IMSTA?
AC: Yes. The whole idea of organizing an anti-software piracy campaign is of great benefit to all of us. We have been supporting IMSTA by doing the Fests for several years now. We are not attending all of them, but I have done NY, LA, Miami and Toronto.
Q. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected Acoustica?
AC: Yes, it has. We are humbled and grateful to report that Acoustica sales are nearly double what they were a year ago. Because our product is a license code that is delivered via the internet and it is used at home, we had hoped business would remain about the same. We never imagined the increase in sales would be what it is. However, we are not taking anything for granted as who knows where the worldwide economy is headed in the coming months.
Q. What is your expectation for the future of software business after COVID?
AC: If the economy holds out, we hope that our current sales levels will hold. Either way, we will still need to innovate and get creative. To that end, look for more new exciting music software products from Acoustica and Cherry Audio by the end of the year.
Q. Are you working on any personal music related work during the pandemic?
AC: Our duo, Red Sand Hill, has been playing a weekly summer residency in my hometown at a beachfront restaurant for the last five years. Sunset gigs are the best! But for the moment, they have all been cancelled this summer. We hope that changes. Most recently, I published a video of my self-quarantine project using Mixcraft 9. Check it out here.