Teenage Engineering is going to stop making synthesizers, as it moves away from selling “obvious end products”.
This somewhat startling revelation was made by company co-founder Jesper Kouthoofd in an interview with High Snobriety. “I’ve come to the conclusion that, for us, the products aren’t the business,’” he says, which may come as news to anyone who’s spent a significant amount of money on an OP-1.
Kouthoofd comes across as a freewheeling thinker who’s well aware of how polarising his company has become. “We have a lot of haters because we tend to disturb people’s minds,” he reasons.
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Of course, there are plenty of people who love the OP-1, too, a product that, prior to its launch in 2011, Kouthoofd says was devised as a protest against making music on a laptop, and was as much about the experience of using it as it was the results it could produce.
“99% percent of people who buy synths don’t use them as a productive tool for making music,” he argues. “It’s therapy. It’s entertainment. It’s a hobby. That’s what the OP-1 is. The first version didn’t even have an undo button.”
A lot of people will agree with that, but it should also be said that much of the aforementioned haters’ criticism focuses on the fact that some – though not all – Teenage Engineering products are expensive. Kouthoofd, though, says that maximising profits isn’t in his thinking.
“Often, when a product may not be reasonable or probably won’t be profitable, it’s good to just put it out there, see what happens,” he suggests, citing the example of the Computer-2 PC case that TE ended up giving away for free last year.
“I wanted it to be $10,” he says. “Everyone said that was impossible because it cost $10 just to make. Then I said, ‘We won’t sell it, we’ll give it away for free. Now you don’t have an argument anymore.’”
While critics might argue that the company could only afford to do this because it must have been making a lot of money on some of its other products, Kouthoofd seems adamant that it’s not perceived market demand that determines where Teenage Engineering goes next.
“I want to make objects that comment on, or raise questions about, why we accept things as they are,” he says.
Who knows what these ‘objects’ will be – just don’t expect them to be ‘obvious’.
