Whether or not it's necessary, it's common in the music production business. There are several egregious examples, Gibson Guitar being perhaps the best known.
Gibson took over an audio startup a relative of mine had co-founded. Gibson offered extremely promising terms - funding, keep creative freedom, just deliver cool products.
The startup delivered the products and met the goals -just in time for Gibson to go bankrupt.
Inside Gibson there was endless corporate infighting. - an executive that was championing the acquisition of the startup was fired - the support was basically nonexistant afterwards (no marketing, nothing)
It’s been a pretty open secret that Gibson has been a hot mess internally for quite a while. At one point the CEO said he saw them more as a lifestyle brand than a guitar brand, like how Harley Davidson tries to position itself in motorcycles (I don’t know anything about motorcycles so maybe I’m wrong but that was the comparison going around).
The best thing that Gibson has done recently has been to unify the Epiphone (their budget brand) line up with their lineup, and Epiphone’s quality has been a lot better since then in my experience. Now you can buy a relatively cheap Epiphone, slap some good aftermarket pickups in it, and have a really great Gibson-style guitar for a lot less than a Gibson.
Yup there's another example of what I think of as the "hedge fund" approach. Sweetwater started as a neighborhood music store, now its owned by a hedge fund, guys who may not even like music. Bob Moog and Roger Linn loved music and it showed in their product. But just like these other examples this isn't the end of the Moog sound, especially since they also now own all the moog software synthesis products you can expect moog to land into the akai mpc line.
My opinion of Gibson was permanently formed when they bought Opcode and its brilliant Vision software (tens of thousands of customers) then just made sure that it died.
Watched an interview with the rapper DoseOne the other day, he said he still makes records but doesn't engage with the music industry (promoting, gigs etc) as there is too much bullshit, instead he does work in the games industry and cites that as much more sane.
