Business, Synthesizer, Bonsai 

Eurorack synthesizers, are a luxury item. Most people cannot afford them. There are small gaps in this truth, and i'd like to be one of those gaps, but as a whole, as a rule of thumb, this is true. This makes me dissapointed, because it's very difficult to recommend Eurorack to most people - its irresponsible. I wish Eurorack was a more affordable medium. Hardware modular synths are objects that bring joy, and allow for more interesting avenues of exploration in electronic music, and they are too expensive for most people to ever own one.

This is one truth, which sits alongside another contradictory truth:

Compared to the many other types of things that are sold, Eurorack synthesizers are a small market. Creating a Eurorack module takes a lot of time, and skills, and knowledge. People that make Eurorack modules need to set high prices, because they know that Eurorack is a luxury market, and that this small market will bring small sales numbers, so they need to make good money on each sale. And, if it's a luxury market, people will already be willing to pay high prices, so it makes sense to charge as much as people are willing to pay. Managing every aspect of running a business on top of design also takes a lot of resources. The people that create Eurorack modules need to eat, and pay rent. 

How can these things be reconciled? Surely the more niche Eurorack is, the more expensive the modules need to be to meet production cost, and the more expensive the modules are, the more niche the market will be. 

I see an alternative future for Eurorack, for modular synths and music technology in general. There will continue to exist of course, huge mass market corporations employing thousands and acting as an enterprise (korg, behringer, moog, etc.), mid level commercial makers, employing under 100 people (ALM, makenoise), and boutique operations (usually one person branded as a company) all of which, to various extents, are concerned with profit. But I see for the future, another sector of Eurorack makers which I would dearly love to exist and grow - those who make modules to make modules only, who sell modules at cost, and make no profit. Those who will participate in a grand exchange of unpaid labor, of open source, open trade secrets, of cannibal, frankenstein, incestuous design, which has no bounds of intellectual property. Design that can afford to be unfeasable because its purpose is not to grow a business, but to explore outer limits of a medium.

And I can hear the retort from here, drumming up as I write this assholeish stance, my devaluation of work- how can I ignore what I just aknowledged? how can I ask people, who probably are barely making a living if any, to forgoe all profit, treating them like some sort of borgouise elite that they clearly aren't? And this is a completely legitimate reaction. 

I'm not actually critiquing the boutique operations, or the medium size makers, or even the large corporations (at least not right here and now). I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea of making money off of music hardware, and I'm not saying that they should all convert to a zero profits model. I'm imagining a new, seperate sector of hobbyists that design modules that can be produced by factories and bought by people, without being thought of as an income stream, or a business. Most likely people that already have jobs, who have lives outside of music equipment, people who want to explore the world of music hardware for exploration's sake. 

Consider the concept of a flower garden. It takes an immense amount of work. Sewing seeds, monitoring, watering, tending, trimming, reading about gardening, meeting with other gardeners, failing, suceeding, year after year re-planting, re-tending, re-learning. You need space to plant on, you need to physically get into the dirt, you need the wisdom of thousands of years of people about horticulture. And most people don't get into gardening to make money. Gardening is massively laborious, and no one bats an eye that people do it for free (in fact it costs money to do). And there's really no practical point to it all. At the end of this part time job that you've given yourself, you have some flowers that look nice, that's all. People garden because it gives them satisfaction, because it's a challenge at its own pace, that lets you remove yourself from the rest of your life and cultivate something beautiful. People find joy in that process, and so gardening is fulfilling.

We treat synthesizers so differently for some reason. Gardening is ancient, and primal, and electronics are largely industrial, commercial. And so we defaultly categorize the development of electronics as a capitalist endeavor, and the development of a garden as a leisure activity. This is the change i want to see in the world of music technology. I see potential synth gardeners everywhere - people who might find fulfillment in the world of music hardware design, free of the pressure and negative constraints that come with needing to have a business, of needing to create something that will safely sell. I see the bored electrical engineer, who could help an artist realize ambitious concepts, neither of them being caught up in who owes who what, because there is no business end of their relationship.