The End of Finale

This past week, as I am quite certain you’ve heard, MakeMusic announced that it would cease all development and sales of their landmark music engraving program, Finale - dealing a heartbreaking blow to the many loyal and long-time composers and musicians who have been writing music with this software for the past 35 years. The reaction from the music community was immediate and fierce, and that shouldn’t have been a surprise. To many, Finale is/was the tool that they use(d) every single day to write music. It is/was the industry standard for publishers too. After getting lots of passionate feedback from their community, the company has identified a clearer path for their users to switch to one of their competitors - Dorico - and how they can continue to use Finale for at least the next few years. I’ve seen some of their/my competitors take this opportunity to try to get Finale users to switch to their product, but I think that is in really poor taste. The last thing Finale users want to do is switch - no matter how good the other products are. I thought that I would share some of my thoughts on the end of Finale, as it has been the one music technology product that has followed me throughout my career.

Coda Music Software released Finale 1.0 in 1988 - the year I graduated high school, and it quickly became THE tool that revolutionized the way composers approached score writing. Finale quickly became a favorite among professionals, thanks to its pioneering ability to fine-tune scores with precision and its impressive high-quality sound samples for playback. For 35 years, Finale was the gold standard in notation software, setting the bar for all others in the field. Sure other competitors came along - my personal favorite being Sibelius. There were DOZENS of other programs too. I personally have owned and used Finale, Sibelius, Personal Composer, PrintMusic, Overture, NotePad, Notion and a few others over the years. Sibelius was definitely the biggest competitor among these, and ultimately it became my go to for composing, arranging and printing out music for my students.

When notation companies realized that the school market could be a lucrative one, they went all in on marketing their products for school use - for both teachers and students. I bought Sibelius for the music technology lab in my school in 2002. I thought that the learning curve was easier for students, but It was expensive to buy it for all 12 computers in my lab, and upgrading every other year was something that I constantly needed to budget for. There were cheaper options made available by both Sibelius and Finale (SibeliusFirst, PrintMusic, and the ever popular (and free) NotePad). Most teachers, like myself, only used the tiniest fraction of the feature set that was available in their notation program of choice. And that was/is the problem with the model. The bottom line is that the only folks that need the full feature set of ANY notation program are professional composers and arrangers. That is the reason why when Noteflight was launched in October of 2008, every notation company started to sweat. Without a steady stream of (very nice) income from schools, it would quickly become very difficult to develop and maintain these products when relying solely on the professional engraver, composer and arranger community - a small but MIGHTY group of professionals. Since then, other low cost competitors - both locally installed like MuseScore and cloud-based like Flat - have come along making it an extremely difficult sell for schools. Why would any school pay for a professional engraving tool when they only need a few features for their students to use?

I want to say here clearly that the end of Finale is a sad moment for me and even worse for the thousands of composers who have come to think of it as their right arm in the composing process. But there is a very harsh reality about developing software that I know all too well. It is EXPENSIVE. I am quite certain that the decision to sunset Finale was a VERY difficult one for the leadership at MakeMusic, but sometimes the financials simply don’t support the product. Although there are thousands of people who regularly buy and upgrade the product, the ever rising costs of developers, as well as testing, marketing, selling and supporting the product mean that you need to sell lots and lots of software to support those people. This may come as a surprise, but if you take a simple feature request - like ones that we get at MusicFirst everyday - it can cost between $3500 and $5000 just to scope out the required development. This development comes with a cost. You then need to decide is the cost worth it. For example, when some of our customers asked us to create a method of saving and reusing scoring rubrics, it cost us nearly $25,000 to actually make that happen. To pay for that, I need to sell a few thousand seats of my product. That doesn’t take into account ANY of the other associated costs with the product (sales, marketing, support). That is the reality of the business that we’re all in. I’m not necessarily trying to defend one of my biggest competitors here, but this is likely the reason that one of the most beloved music software titles in history is being retired. The worldwide sales number simply can’t support the ongoing development, sales, marketing and support. Music engraving is in fact a “niche” market. A VERY important one, but it’s small. I’ll bet anything that they have been losing money on this product over the past few years and that isn’t sustainable no matter how hard you try.

The 20th Anniversary of Finale photo

What I will say is that 35 years in the software market is INCREDIBLE, and I think that every single person who ever worked on the product should be very proud of what they have collectively achieved. The folks behind the product are some of the finest musicians and humans that I have ever worked with and I am sure that they were all equally shocked and sad when the news broke on Monday. People like Tom Johnson, Leigh and Mavis Kallestad, Tom Carruth, Roger Williams, and David Hawley (all now retired or out of the industry) are some of the finest people I know, and I miss working with them - even though they were often my competitor. But as the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end. I am extremely sympathetic to all of the folks who now need to find and learn an alternative program. It is not an easy (or fun) road ahead. I know many of the folks at Dorico and they are terrific people. Daniel Spreadbury (formerly of Sibelius) is the Product Marketing Manager and leads a great team to make their product address the needs of their customers. You are in good hands! Hopefully in a year or two, this painful moment will be a distant memory, and composers, arrangers and music engravers will be happily typing away on their new program of choice.

Farewell Finale. You will be missed.