A quick look at US stores shows some selling the MPC X at full price, and surprisingly (to me) Sweetwater is selling the X at a $600 discount "while supplies last". Guitar Center and Musician Friend are at $500 off... so I think it's indicating that there may be an interest by vendors in reducing/dumping stock in exchange for "the next big thing". That's just taking a big leap of faith though, so I wouldn't read too much into it.
It is NAMM though, so I'm sure that Akai is going to have a few things to showcase.
New hardware (not necessarily an MPC) is probably a safe bet as they've seemed to be doing well in the controller space, and controllers do tend to go well with software. Standalone, for me is just a maybe. A retro XL would make sense, but we've been talking about Akai running out of CPUs for a few years now, and they've been pumping out new hardware consistently. A retro style X/XL would make sense to me as a capstone to the current product line, but it might bite too heavily into the recent Timbaland launch... plus some folks here see the X as a failure because it is too expensive... and they may be right. $2299 (or more for an XL?) is quite a pill to swallow.
Wouldn't be surprised if there's a new firmware with some kind of new plugins, but that's probably the easiest thing to consider. Akai has shown that they can attract people with some decent quality plugins for free just to stick around on the platform, and it's even attracted new folks to show up. They've also shown that with some higher quality plugins that they've been able to get both early adopters and deal hunters to drop some cash. They've certainly got metrics now on how to capture both ends of the market, I'd expect them to fine tune this over time by testing the waters, and as we're seeing they're almost certainly messing around with PC first releases, Standalone only releases, bundles, and all that... the trick will be to see how many games they play... how willing they are to let people transfer software licenses... and how we all feel on the other side of whatever happens here.
I'm kind of shocked that Akai hasn't come up with their own hardware integration... something like Roland's Aira... to create a kind of ecosystem to draw people in to the product portfolio deeper, but maybe with the plugins they don't need to do that *shrug*.
Beyond that, I'm not sure their splice integration worked out the way Akai hoped... but I wouldn't be surprised to see another service partnership... it's a tight rope to walk though since you need to make sure that the integration is beneficial for both parties from a business standpoint, otherwise it doesn't make sense for one of the businesses to invest. As much as I think there's room for integration like Soundcloud or most other services, I doubt that would be a draw for MPC users as they've either got it or they don't...
I can also foresee Akai users getting exhausted with a constant stream of plugins... we're all only going to shell out so much before we hit the "do I really need this" wall. Especially when there is such a hot market on so many other platforms. Whether Akai releases a 3.0 firmware, or some other MPC firmware number, based on their current ecosystem attaching product SKU availability to firmware versions, they've got to do the heavy lifting to convince us to upgrade to the next firmware version in the first place. Unless they can break this, I don't see a clear path for a paid 3.0 firmware release, plus more paid plugins, and then plus plus plus paid content, expansions, etc...
Personally, I feel like if they want to continue the goodwill, Akai needs to show that their plugin releases don't just drop and then get forgotten... they should continue to add value to them. It's cheap enough for them to add more patch settings per plugin, they could add some free skins/themes to their plugins, or over time add little bits of new functionality to keep what you paid for (or some of what you paid for) feeling fresh.
Anyways... enough rambling... as you said... Thursday
Do they exhibit under a different name? In fact I can't find any of the inMusic brands. Same for Superbooth. It's still some time away but I think big companies act more long term so if they attend they should know already.
