Tim Boot, director of global marketing for Meyer Sound, is a Golden Reel award-winning motion picture music editor and music-mixing engineer who has also worked in audio engineering on multiple Grammy Award-winning records. He has worked for Meyer Sound in various high-level positions for the last six years. Here, he gives Live Design a brief history lesson on immersive sound and his predictions for a post-pandemic future.
Live Design: Our recent survey into the state of the industry showed that being able to pivot and working in diverse markets was very helpful during the pandemic. Is this part of the reason why Meyer Sound is still here?
Tim Boot: Absolutely! We are extremely diverse and not just with product offerings, it’s also the markets we serve. Compared to our competitors, we serve more markets and more customer types. We do work in cinema, but cinema was hit very hard just like the live sound, touring, and rental industries. But we also serve the installation markets including corporate, houses of worship, and education, and a lot of those installation markets didn't get hit quite as hard. In fact, a lot of installation customers moved up their schedules during the downtime because the venues were closed so they could do renovations. We had our biggest year ever for our Constellation Acoustic System.
So yes, I think that diversity in our product offering and the markets we serve allowed us to get through the year. It was tough, absolutely, and it was a tough year for our customers and everybody involved, but we came through it.
LD: Does this mean that you will focus more on those parts of the market going forward?
TB: I don’t think so. We are an innovative company; we like to solve problems across multiple markets and that hasn’t changed. Even pre-Covid we looked at the landscape we knew that the corporate market, for example, was going to be one of the fastest growing sectors but we also want to remain faithful to our existing markets. And we're starting to see light at the end of the tunnel. I just saw a press release from Live Nation and they’re planning double the events that they planned in 2019! That's excellent for the industry and also good for us, we are developing new products for the installation market and but we're absolutely 100% supporting all of our traditional markets as well.
LD: As a global company will it change your focus in terms of recovery in different regions?
TB: We are not making any predictions on who is recovering first, but after a very rough 2020 the US seems to be managing the recovery quite well. We are global and it is critical to look at things regionally from marketing perspective, but the most important thing for us to do is reach customers. How we present our products to customers in each region is a really interesting challenge and continues to be so.
LD: You said it was a tough year for you guys but you managed to release a new product [Spacemap Go] in October at the height of the pandemic. What was behind that decision and did it pay off?
TB: Trying to launch a product last year was one of the most challenging times ever to do it as no one had any idea what the next few months were going to look like. But we realized that with Spacemap Go, which is an immersive mixing platform, it takes time to build knowledge and we decided to get the product in front of key users. They might be using it in studios or warehouses but they were not taking it on tour and so had the chance to get used to it, so that when live events come back they're not hitting it cold. It’s difficult for users to embrace new technologies [in a short time frame on the road]. Many of the creative people in the industries that would use that product, unfortunately, were not working and had this time to learn and try new things. The jury is out on whether we got the timing right.
LD: Spacemap Go is designed for immersive experiences, is this the type of entertainment you think will be big in the future?
TB: Whenever we talk about Spacemap Go we must look at our past, because we originally created the core technology almost 30 years ago. We’ve been in the immersive market for decades at Cirque du Soleil shows and big Broadway shows. We created the new product to make it easier to use in our existing products. These new tools are about bringing that creative power to anybody who wants to do something beyond mono and stereo. I think we’ll see a boom in the worship market and off-Broadway Theatre, and regional and school theatre, now that sound designers have the ability to do immersive sound. With Spacemap Go we took the approach that the software capabilities needed to work with existing products, so there's over 3,000 individual systems in the world that are all capable of doing immersive audio. If you suddenly decide you want to run out do immersive sound on your show tonight there is a good chance you will have a piece of hardware that we made that can do it. We love selling new products and developing new ones, but our products last forever and this technology integrates beautifully so our users can learn quickly on the system they are familiar with.
LD: Have you been able to make the same investment in R&D over the last 18 months?
TB: I think, like everybody, we had to re-evaluate and to scale back for a period of time but R & D continued and the team has been working solidly throughout. You are not going to see a slowdown in product releases from us, we have launched a few other products this year and we’ll be shipping a new version of a product later in the summer.
LD: Where did you scale back?
TB: Our founders are very focused on the safety of the team and our customers, so we scaled back on travel and we're still working from home.
LD: You have decades of experience in many aspects of the entertainment industry, from the movie industry to music and acoustics etc. Do you have a prediction on how things will recover after the pandemic?
TB: I firmly believe in a return to the Roaring Twenties! I think you are going to see a creative boom in the next decade that we haven't seen in a long, long time. I am in touch with my friends in the film industry and it has changed so much in recent years, the rate at which content is being created is going to accelerate like we've never seen. The pandemic has changed the way people work, I talked to some friends in Los Angeles where I used to live and film composers are leaving because they don’t have to live there anymore. Studios may not be making as many blockbusters as before but they're going to make 10 times the number of smaller projects. It will change the way people experience live events, you are going to still experience large-scale events, but I think we are going to see people creating much more intimate experiences and more engaging experiences. We’ve got 12 to 18 months of pent-up creative energy. It has been the most challenging period in our careers but also potentially the most exciting time is to come. That's what the arts needs, that demand and support for ticket sales as people realize what they've been missing.
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May 20, 2021 at 05:28PM
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Q&A: Tim Boot From Meyer Sound | LiveDesignOnline - Live Design
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