I think that the rot has been ongoing for arranger sales for at least ten years (maybe 15!). One of the ‘majors’ has already left the segment while the rest of the company’s products thrive. This is a bit different to the collapse of the home organ industry, which tended to take the entire company down with them as they put all their eggs in one basket.

The rest of the surviving manufacturers have increased the time between models to close to double the length they used to (and few of them are released in anything close to a ‘finished’ state!). This has tended to ramp up the speculation and desperation to fever pitch and the consequent disappointment that so little may have changed despite twice the R&D time.

I remember the death of the home organ well. I used to demo and sell them. That wasn’t how popular music was going, synths were covering the traditional role of the organ player in bands, and home players were finding out that a single manual arranger was a far cheaper alternative to a massive organ with two manuals and a pedalboard (that rarely got played in its lifetime!).

Personally, I think the arranger industry should concentrate on adding arranger tech to existing workstation keyboards rather than the other way around. Things like the Montage M and FantomX are the future of pop music, but would definitely benefit from some basic arranger chord recognition in addition to arpeggiators (two totally different ways of interpreting what you play), and some of the arranger’s OMB ease of use features (lyrics display, emphasis on live changing of sounds without having to change volume or effect levels).

Asking an already struggling arranger division to come up with integrating workstation features into a ‘normal’ arranger seems to be beyond their tiny R&D teams’ capabilities in any decent time frame. It’s time to accept the ‘pure’ arranger is too niche of a product for meaningful timely development, but piggybacking arranger stuff onto existing well developed workstations may be its only survival strategy…

I remember the days of watching floor space in stores devoted to home organs make way to synths. I’m pretty sure that the same thing has happened to arrangers. The solution was to add organ backing functions to those synths, not to add synth functions to home organs (although a few tried with little success).

Perhaps the current arranger manufacturers could take a lesson from the last paradigm shift? Integrate with what the market is using, rather than riding the Titanic down to a watery grave… 🎹