LOL! I don’t really care if anyone here believes me about where the customers in the notation market are. While I may influence plenty of others in their notation purchases, in the end I’m just one sale. It is sort of silly to discount the marketing departments of Dorico’s main two competitors though, after all, it is their job to know where their customers are and what appeals to their users.
If these links violate the message board protocol, then they can just be deleted, but look at who endorses Finale:
With the likely exception of Jennifer Higdon, all of those musicians require chord symbols. Look at who Sibelius is featuring:
A TV composer and two movies, all of which require chord symbols. The potential sales for notation software are in the genres that these two companies have featured, or they are in education where they are appealing to students who want to participate in these genres, or else their marketing would not be featuring them. In terms of potential sales, there are more sale possibilities among students and faculty of Berklee’s Film Scoring department than the entirety of Boosey & Hawkes. (Full-time B&H employees using notation software anyway.) I’m glad Dorico is talking to B&H, as one of my pet peeves about Finale and Sibelius is that they keep attaching “features” that have nothing to do with quality engraving, but if Dorico is to succeed, they are going to have to produce sales. I’ll stop harping on this after this post, but without chord symbols they really are eliminating the “vast majority” of their potential customers, which will affect sales, which will in turn affect the long-term viability of Dorico.
I really would like to see Dorico be successful, and releasing v1.0 without chord symbols will be detrimental to their chances of success.