Abstract

"Industry Composition, Technology Evolution and Changing User Preferences: The Case of the Music Synthesizer"

Andrew Nelson, University of Oregon (ajnelson@uoregon.edu)

The music synthesizer industry began in the 1960s as ‘tinkerers’ borrowed electronic components created for radios and used them to generate and manipulate sound. Less than two decades later, the advent of digital synthesis led to a dramatic consolidation of firms in the industry, with large Japanese conglomerates emerging at the forefront. Yet surprisingly, today’s synthesizer industry features more instruments based on the analog technology of the 1960s than on more recent digital technology. And importantly, most firms producing synthesizers are again small and focused--including some firms that had earlier gone out of business.

Questions of industry and technology evolution are central, of course, to many literatures. Chandler, for example, offered a detail account of how and why industries consolidate into large, diversified firms (Chandler, 1977; Chandler 1990). Other scholars emphasize the emergence of dominant designs--that is, technological arrangements that become ‘locked-in’ until a technological disruption occurs, typically introduced by new startup firms (e.g., Abernathy & Utterback, 1978; Christensen & Bower, 1996; Cohen & Tripsas, 2018).

Neither the Chandlerian perspective nor the dominant design and disruption literatures, however, fully explain the case of the music synthesizer. Even as Chandler’s theory anticipates the early growth of the industry, it does not account for when and why old technologies may ‘reemerge’--and small and focused firms alongside them. And while the dominant design literature emphasizes the role of startups in seeding disruptions, it assumes that these disruptions will be new technologies, not old ones and even old firms.

In this paper, we offer a detailed history of the music synthesizer industry, drawing on decades of archival data and interviews. We posit that the industry’s unique pattern can be attributed to a combination of changes in complementary technologies and in user preferences. Ultimately, our observations serve to integrate different insights on how firms, industries and technologies co-evolve.