Instrument/synth designer here. There are many possibilities for Phil. He really has to think in terms of musician value, not the software artifact. My first

Instrument/synth designer here. There are many possibilities for Phil. He really has to think in terms of musician value, not the software artifact. My first suggestion is to sell a playable instrument, e.g. to bundle a controller with a pre-installed RPi. The real market is for something a musician can switch on and play. Musicians want a box you can open, turn on, press buttons and hear sound. No logins, configuration, compilation, boot-up, login, installation. Make sure you have the right jacks (MIDI, 1/4" audio output, 3.5mm headphone). Notice all this hardware is difficult to pirate. Musicians only have limited time to pirate and a surprising number of them actually pay for software after pirating it for a while. They are mainly motivated by reliability, getting the newest thing (piracy has some lag associated with it) and resale value (pirated stuff can't be re-sold) and to some extent social embarrassment. Basically, if they're making money from your software, they're more likely to pay you. I have found the overlap between programmers and musicians to be a thin-ass Venn diagram. You can't sell possibilities or flexibility (only expandability, but that's a low priority). You have to sell playability. Most musicians will take chances on something new, but they don't want to invest a ton of time in it. They'll see what it does NOW, not in the future and introduce it as an accompaniment to an existing track. As they build a relationship with it, they'll rely on it more and more. My suggestion to Phil is to put together a small run of about 10 immediately-playable systems and sell them. Stay close to the people you sell to, encouraging them to use it and listening to them. Use their feedback to iterate. Standard startup stuff. You'll have some pirates, but those will mostly be people who are good at the Raspberry Pi, not people like my uncle, who can turn on a laptop, but find computers tedious and prefer to spend their energy strumming, knob-twiddling, looking for people to rehearse with, etc. In fact, your pirates will help spread the word to musician friends. After that part is covered, you can get into the marvelous flexibility of software synthesis! But again, make it easy for musicians. You won't want them to have to learn a new skill, such as RPi, just to use your synthesizers!!!