To the thread OP, with all due respect, I'm not sure if your team is solving the right problem. You mention "We (Mark and Justin) started writing music together a few years ago but felt limited in our ability to create anything that we were proud of." but how does that indicate a problem with the tools rather than your mastery of the composition process?

Let me say it another way. The cambrian explosion I have seen in the space of bedroom pop paints a different picture, which is that a sufficiently motivated teenager can jump from wanting to write music to producing polished hits in months of focused effort, and from there, a signed record label contract. This cycle has been progressively shortening over the past decade with the improvement of at home DAW software/plugins and median quality of computer horsepower and entry-level audio hardware.

This is also not necessarily hidden knowledge -- across the many forums of bedroom producers, almost every one of them have had a phase where they believed the problem was their tools, which distracts them from improving their composition fundamentals, and which is almost always resolved by forcing themselves to write better songs with even more primitive tools. While this discovery took a bit more time when tools were more primitive, it is a process that hungry early-stage composers hit a lot earlier today given the power of tools and the expected level of sophistication they are all expected to have by the market. Indeed, I experienced this myself formally during university when my college music composition composer forced our classes to write songs with constrained pitch class sets and instruments. The constraints actually forced us to figure out how to use more primitive tools to their full potential by making up for it with creativity, rather than using more advanced tools to less potential by virtue of less creativity.

Combined with the rise of streaming audio platforms, it is also the case that the median level of conceptual polish as well as the bar for releasing a track that breaks through the noise has also risen. If every teenager excited about music can go from 0 to professional outputs in several months, then one would expect to see the results of that in the market -- which I have certainly seen.

My concern with your platform thesis is that it is optimizing a part of the composer's journey that you felt but which was not a material reality of your target power user's day-to-day for any period of time except the very beginning, and that you didn't do enough research into the market before building around a problem to solve. The comment I am replying to goes quite a bit closer towards solving what I see as the real problem: helping power users dial in closer to the sound they are looking for and already know how to get to, but simply in less time. Given that you have a professional DJ and producer on your team, I find it curious that this wasn't immediately caught and corrected for in your original market thesis.

If you do not correct this grave mistake in your thesis about the market, I believe your product is doomed to fail. You'll achieve success solving the problems of users who are doomed to never be successful musicians, but you'll fail to solve the problems of users who are on the arc towards becoming very successful, merely because you haven't made the deliberate choice to focus on them and their specific needs. If you did, I think you would arrive at a very different product.

1. Who actually needs boutique gear? I am not saying it isn't fun. I am not saying that it can't be a hobby in itself nor am I saying some tiny percentage of the music industry might need it. But in pretty much all the interviews I have read with successful musician they use something horribly mundane for most of their career, because it isn't about the gear. So does the weekend warrior need boutique stuff?

2. Is teenage engineering actually boutique? I don't know that much about music gear, but I do know a fair bit about electronics and it certainly doesn't look in anyway custom to me. You might think that it is because e.g. they use bare PCBs. But that would be a faulty assumption. So what is expensive part here?

While software on an iPad or a laptop these days can essentially make any style of music without the need for additional hardware, there's a sizable group for whom that process isn't inspiring or enjoyable.

There's definitely a lot of gear fetishism in the music scene which is definitely its own problem, but I think that there's value in making music with the tools that work for you, rather than just with what's cheapest, highest-tech, or most versatile.

Musicians like their devices because the UX design is interesting and relatively smooth, and the devices have a lot of flexibility for making interesting music.

But playing music in public versus over headphones is more musical...it's not just what live musicians do, DJ'ing is also a thing.

As is audio engineering, which requires the willingness to do more work than seems reasonable to others to get the sound you want. And her workflow certainly looks a lot like that.

Having said that, I think part of the allure of Teenage Engineering is musicians believing in the holistic package, not just the physical product.

Give Paul McCartney a shitty USB mike and a shitty guitar and he'll still sound like Paul McCartney. Whatever he creates will be unusually musical, even if it's not polished.

Give most people world class studio time with a top engineer and they'll produce something mediocre at best, no matter how how much effort goes into it.

Good tools get out of the way and sound right without much effort, but all that really does is remove one layer of distraction/excuse.

The gear fetish market is driven by people who are mostly just collectors. Some musicians are also collectors. They will buy special vintage guitars, synths, studio processors, and so on because they're useful and the sound works for them.

But mostly it's middle aged middle class professionals - dentists, doctors, lawyers, some software developers - buying equipment as a hobby in itself, because buying is a lot easier and less stressful than creating.

I regularly have sessions where I attempt to recreate sounds or full songs too. Great learning tool!

But, you also need to jam and be creative.

Too much technical learning without creativity and you make boring stuff. Too much creativity without technical learning and you find it difficult to express yourself.

Recorded an EP with a guy who had rebuilt a bunch of used gear by hand so nothing even physically made it into the studio unless he could afford it and fix it. He had plenty to work with, but it was largely just the staples ... and one beast of a tape machine for mastering. Funny thing, is he found a lot of settings that just worked and kept most of them. There would be some tweaking, but mostly with the levels more than anything once we found the sound.

Recording on our own, digitally, had my pal tweaking various parameters until all hours—introducing different EQ's and reverbs and then pulling them and replacing them and tweaking them and trying to find the minutiae of what would make it just right to him, but he was rarely ever satisfied. I don't think it was just him, it's that there were so many options available to us—even without paying for premium VSTs and the like.

And we were recording what was essentially folk-rock or roots-rock. There's a lot of leeway in recording demos and EP tracks in that space.

Recording, like software, I've grown to like to keep it as simple as I can, when I can.

I feel like the older model of accumulating physical gear helped put some limits on how complexity grew in small studios, but that has all been upended by software. There is definitely a balance to be struck between the capabilities of the setup and what will actually result in the best creative output. Creativity often thrives within constraints, and it can paradoxically become harder to work with objectively better equipment.

There are so many musicians with racks of very expensive equipment and who mix and produce in the world best studios yet their music is shit (in my beholder eye).

And then you have a 15-year old putting an amazing song on SoundCloud, with atrocious mixing and mastering.

The best cure for gear acquisition syndrome I've found is shipping deadlines. "Real artists ship." Even if it's a hobby, progress is measured by some tangible event, whether it be a Github checkin, an upload to Soundcloud, a live performance, or a blog post.

Limitations also help. The most powerful DAW, programming language, or guitar pedal will force you to spend more time fiddling than creating. So what if it's not exactly the sound you hear in your head, or the webpage looks funny? It will never ship if perfect is the goal.

Owl City is a great example of a talented person producing their own material (then mastered) which fit the quality expectations and was, pretty much, recorded in one guy's bedroom.

Gotye's "Used to Know" was recorded all by himself in a room over a barn in New Zealand.

These are just a couple recent examples where I think the technology and dynamics of music production are really coming together (Trent Reznor is a great historical study). Personally I really enjoy playing with a talented drummer - which I will do tonight and probably broadcast on Periscope - but when I'm at home, making tunes that I'll eventually release, I can get fantastic results from Apple's GarageBand "Drummer" algorithm thingy.

The tools that exist now would've changed my world as a teenager. I think teenagers growing up now - the ones serious about making music - have more tools and opportunities than ever before. I'm a wee bit jealous, no lie.

Edit: To clarify regarding your edit, the personal production can now extend to live performance. Rappers typically just have a DJ behind them (sometimes a live band). There's a lot of wiggle-room for mid-market musicians to simply bring their box of backing tracks with them to perform live, and I think that is becoming more and more acceptable. I used to get really odd looks using a Netbook + Akai APC40 on stage, and now that's pretty tame compared to some of the other gear setups indies can employ. This way, the musician makes more money because there are fewer musicians on stage that need to be paid (my personal approach).