Was I right about Muse Group?

I previously wrote about Muse Group’s enshittification.

Outside of the cease-and-desist from their side, not much has happened since: On UG, There still is a “special offer” which expires “today” for 80% off (this time an autumn sale). I still think their business tactics are disgraceful and misleading, they apparently do not.

However, there has been a new development: Much of Musescore’s previous team has left Muse to make… a Musescore (.com) competitor, called Notefinder! This includes the core trio that made Musescore 4 happen (including, of course, tantacrul), various licensing and publishing folks and programmers. And they even made a video about it:

And look! Parts of the video are dedicated to the exact same grievances I aired earlier. As Vasily (former CTO of Muse) put it:

I think I want to build a company I’d love to be a customer of, and I’d not be embarrassed. And I’d not be bombarded by tons of annoying pop-ups, infinite black-fridays…

Yeah.

Oh and also: In making the company, Notefinder immediately found funding to get them off the ground. Muse meanwhile recently had the Francisco Partners exit the company.

Muse’s enshittification thus has claimed its first unexpected consequence for them: A large-scale exodus of some of their most skilled and senior personnel towards a direct competitor – with, as far as I can tell from the video, the only promises being that there won’t be any enshittification, and that working conditions will be less byzantine.

And this is not something they can fix by sending out more cease-and-desists towards people who are critical of their business practices.

Anyhow, if you want to join the score publishing folks of Notefinder yourself, go to their recruitment page. I probably won’t be joining in the near future (I’m not a musician, I’m a drummer, and probably more interested in audio/video stuff than score stuff), but I wish them the best of luck!