The Making of Modern Music, One IP Misstep at a Time

Daniel W. Steinbrook

Technology Strategy & Analysis

November 19, 2024

To musicians in the 1960s, the analog synthesizer was as terrifying as generative AI is today. For the first time, a single device could produce the sound of any instrument, real or imaginary. Needless to say, the predicted extinction of the human musician never came to pass.

I recently read Albert Glinsky’s 2022 biography of Robert Moog, Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution. Recounting the personal and business travails of a central figure in analog synthesizers, the book covers how electronic instruments came to permeate nearly all genres of modern music. A recurring theme in the book is how Moog never achieved the financial success of the superstar performing artists who used his instruments. Not infrequently, these missed opportunities were often related to intellectual property.

An early 1970s Minimoog, one of the first commercially successful analog synthesizers available to a wide audience (source: Wikimedia Commons)

Perhaps the most obvious of Moog’s IP weaknesses was the trademark. Glinsky recounts how the Moog name became for a time synonymous with the invention – the Velcro of synthesizers, so to speak. This ubiquity led to near genericization of the term, jeopardizing the trademark. (It didn’t help that the eponymous company often stylized the name in lowercase on their products and marketing.) A series of acquisitions led Robert Moog to leave his own company, and after subsequent acquisitions, the company stopped using the Moog name. When others jumped on the abandoned trademark, both domestically and internationally, it cost Robert Moog considerable time and money to get back his own name.

The book’s assessment of patents is more dubious. True, only one patent was ever issued in Moog’s name, on a ladder-shaped filter design, leaving his analog synthesizer under-protected by most measures. But citing to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, Glinsky asserts that the synthesizer was inherently unpatentable, as it was a collection of well-known electronic components rather than a fundamentally new invention. To the contrary, many patented inventions fit this description of being new arrangements of common parts. A blatant counterexample to this argument is US Patent 2,033,826, a musical instrument whose primary components are nothing more than a pitchfork and cigar box:

patent drawing
It’s hard to believe that an invention as unusual (for the 1960s) as a musical instrument built from analog electronics would not be filled with novel and nonobvious choices. In an analog synthesizer, musical properties like pitch and volume are represented in physical properties like voltage and capacitance. How an inventor chooses to represent these can make or break whether a device drifts out of tune or even catches fire.

But when those unpatented ideas aren’t kept confidential, opportunities to utilize would-be trade secrets abound. Glinsky tells the story of how Ikutaro Kakehashi, who had founded the nascent Roland company in Japan, paid an extended visit to Moog’s facilities in the early 1970s. Whether a legitimate attempt at a potential Japanese manufacturing partnership or a case of economic espionage, Kakehashi’s takeaway knowledge was sufficient for him to bring a new keyboard to market in short order. Roland remains a dominant manufacturer of electronic instruments to this day.

Admittedly, the demise of the Moog company by the 1980s can’t be entirely chalked up just to a dearth of trademarks, patents and trade secrets. Analog synths were eventually displaced by digital ones, thanks in large part to their smaller size, lower cost and better power consumption. But analog synths still have a loyal following today, due to their warmer sound, at least to the ears of their fans. And it’s probably fair to say many of those fans aren’t aware of the lax intellectual property that contributed to the electronic-dominated popular music world we know today.