Ten Years of Plugin Boutique

Ten Years of Plugin Boutique

After a decade of service under the awnings of the plugin marketplace, our ability to serve our customers is the strongest it's been yet. We’re not ones to toot our own horns, but Plugin Boutique exists today as the place where the best music software companies come to sell their wares to producers, musicians and DJs worldwide. 

Nowadays, we host over 6000 plugins from nearly 200 developers, from the Best Synths Out There, at All Budgets, to the Strangest Instruments You've Never Seen. Throughout, we offer an unparalleled customer experience, and work hard to nurture the ideas and creations of fledgling music software companies… but it wasn’t always so. Here’s the story of how we got from an idea to an entire marketplace, and a few of the landmarks along the way.

A One-stop Shop

The music software landscape was markedly different to what it is today when Loopmasters’ Matt Pelling approached Gareth Halsall with the initial concept for Plugin Boutique in 2010. Plugin developers in the space were somewhat scattered to the wind with no real unified framework for distribution or marketing. This meant that producers’ time and attention was often spread thin across the web, with a confusing mixture of accounts and download destinations to stay on top of. Matt’s idea was simple but pioneering: to create a plugin marketplace that would act as a central depot for all your music software needs. Put simply, “One login for all your plugins”. 

Aside from the obvious accessibility benefits, the ‘boutique’ portion of the plan was geared towards creating a bustling environment for small independent companies in which they could sell and market plugins. Many of these companies weren’t much more than one or two young developers coding in their basements, with little means of getting their plugins out there other than word of mouth. Matt and Gareth’s marketing experience with Loopmasters meant they were uniquely positioned to help.

Plugins for All

After designing the company’s identity and launching the website, it was time to roll up our sleeves and start selling plugins. With Plugin Boutique, the marketplace has always been our priority, so the goal wasn’t to emerge as a factory line for plugins intended to compete in the hot spots of the industry. Building a trustworthy brand name was an important consideration however, so we decided to kick off an in-house product range, with Credland Audio’s aptly named BigKick the first plugin to feature. Carbon Electra, VirtualCZ, and StereoSavage followed; all distinctive entities that stood in their own space and contributed to the growing trust and loyalty that Plugin Boutique was building with producers.

The Dollar Deal

Over the ten years of Plugin Boutique’s existence, one campaign stands out that ignited the company’s development and put us on the radar of producers everywhere: the AIR Music Technology $1 deal. The decision behind this campaign was to offer a product – Xpand!2 – at a low price unmatched in the market, allowing all producers access to a legendary workstation. Xpand!2 makes it easy for users to create polished patches via its four sound slots, and became widely popular at the time because of its huge bank of quality presets, accessible interface and low CPU drain.

The dollar deal was a huge success, and producers who snagged the bargain duly stuck around, not least because of the benefits going through the Plugin Boutique infrastructure provided, for instance the excellent customer service they received from our dedicated support team. The sight of further affordable plugin deals elsewhere on the site didn’t hurt either!

Scaler: A Therious Revolution

Late 2017 saw the launch of one of our most groundbreaking in-house plugins. As with previous releases, we’d tried to find a space where we weren’t stepping on the toes of our own developers, and with this niche we struck gold! After working with David Carbone, Eduoard Mainier and their team at SAMPLIFY for over a year on their concept for a music theory-based MIDI plugin, we released the comprehensive and inspirational Scaler. 

Scaler’s drag-and-drop progression builder, scale detection and chord suggestion all went into making it one of our most successful plugins ever, and we didn’t stop there! These days, Scaler 2 features a guitar fret interface, audio scale detection, melodic expressions and loads more.

From Boutique to Everything

After successfully navigating a tricky period dealing with middlemen distribution companies that favoured an outdated physical goods model, Plugin Boutique began to transition to relying on direct relationships with suppliers. Suddenly, exclusive relationships with the big boys in the industry became possible, which proved to be another milestone moment in the company’s history. 

Developers like iZotope, Soundtoys, Antares and others started benefiting from increased sales through Plugin Boutique, sending the site’s user base through the roof in the process. The strong connections we’ve built with these developers have served us well since then, and are a testament to our identity as a company that treats its partners and customers fairly.

What’s Next?

Today, Plugin Boutique is a busy and welcoming marketplace that stocks the full spectrum of production tools. A quick glance at the manufacturers section of our site shows a list teeming with both niche and mainstream plugin developers, and our shelves are stocked with effects, instruments, studio tools and software bundles selling at affordable prices. 

Looking to the future, we plan to evolve our platform and build in more customer options, along with continuing to develop quality in-house plugins. We’ve also partnered up with Beatport, the number one destination for electronic artists and DJs, with whom we plan to offer producer opportunities and remix competitions. 

Thank you for being a part of the last ten years of Plugin Boutique, and we look forward to having you with us for the next ten!