Hi Bachus.....I didn't mean that literally (sell the keyboard for half the price). I meant.....deduct whatever monies a manufacturer spends in style creation from the retail price. Throwing this out there....just figure out how much of the selling price of the keyboard includes styles development and deduct it from that selling price. You'll make more money by selling the styles a la carte and the player will then be a happy camper also. A win-win situation to me.

Look at what they did in the computer world. Previously you could buy a program like MS WORD and own it and the license from now until forever. No more costs. Now you buy the package cheaply and you renew the license (to use it) every year. Point being......for good or bad, Microsoft changed its marketing. The arranger world has learned nothing....been slogging along in the mud forever. For "good or bad" change SOMETHING. Catch our interest with something innovative. Wake us up. Save us from the drudgery of "same old, same old!"

I for one, don't want to pay for a keyboard that has features and styles I'm not going to use. Like that complex operating system on the PA4x. I'm wondering how much of the cost of that keyboard can be attributed to such complicated (mostly unneeded) software. And, it IS complicated. There are options in there that a rocket scientist will never get to (nor have the time to get to it).

I bought the PA3x with the intention of customizing the sounds and styles, etc. I'm now finding out you either spend whatever time you have working on getting better musically or working on learning a new operating system and keyboard features. Not enough time for both. And now I think someone mentioned that the PA4x is different even from the PA3x and you now have to learn that new one. Not for me anymore......I just want to play music and let the good stuff come out of me and not the fancy overpriced keyboard.

Using the PA4x as an example, I'm saying......why pay for 10,000 sounds, 10,000 styles, 10,000 ways to customize, etc. Just give me a shell of a keyboard and let me add my functions that I need. Like buying a car. You start out with 4 tires and a steering wheel and keep adding on all the options that YOU want until you're put together your perfect machine.

And......Rikki is right...not just the styles. You should have the option to cherry-pick whatever it is you need. I think that way they would sell a ton of keyboards.....a lot more than they're selling now if they adopted this method. After all, many of us ARE educated consumers. We're not going to pay extra for a generic machine that was blanket designed for everyone around the world.

Mark