inMusic now owns Native Instruments. What happens to your Kontakt and Komplete licences?

Native Instruments, the Berlin company behind Kontakt, Komplete, Maschine and Traktor, has been split up and sold out of insolvency. The administrator, Torsten Martini of the law firm GÖRG, says the sale took effect on 1 July 2026. inMusic, the US owner of Akai Professional, Moog, Numark and Rane, took over the business of NI's three German companies, its UK and Hong Kong subsidiaries and one of its two US companies. The other US company, iZotope, went to Artel Software, part of Boris FX.

For producers, the corporate structure matters less than one question: will the instruments and libraries you paid for keep opening?

What did inMusic and NI promise?

When the deal was signed in May, inMusic said business would carry on as normal across every NI brand, with products, platforms and customer support fully available. Its CEO, Jack O'Donnell, told customers that the tools they rely on today will keep working.

NI's own FAQ, posted the same day, is more specific. It says existing licences are unaffected and need no action, and that products, downloads and subscriptions stay active. It also says Kontakt continues and that the NKS ecosystem continues, along with NI's relationships with third-party developers and hardware partners. On product roadmaps and on Berlin, it says only that more will be shared once plans are confirmed.

Boris FX made a similar promise for iZotope. It says RX, Ozone, Neutron and Nectar licences and subscriptions remain fully active, and that iZotope's engineering, product and support teams are staying in place as a business unit.

We have seen no report of a licence being revoked or of a library failing to activate because of the sale. The concern is about what comes next.

What has happened since the sale closed?

The story has moved quickly, and much of it rests on anonymous reports that the companies haven't confirmed.

• Layoffs. In July, MusicTech reported that about 100 NI employees had allegedly been let go across every department, including the whole customer support team, which inMusic would replace with its group-wide support. The department details came from an anonymous Reddit post. NI declined to comment.
• UK office. In August, a Reddit thread said inMusic had let go of NI's entire UK office. MusicTech says the roles at risk include product and engineering staff, many working on Maschine, Kontakt and Komplete.
• Leadership. MusicTech says company filings in July show that CEO Nick Williams and chief product and technology officer Simon Cross were removed, and that inMusic Europe CEO Richard Seymour appears to have replaced them. Synth Anatomy reported the same changes.

inMusic hasn't confirmed numbers. Its statement to MusicTech says it is simplifying NI's structure, including NI UK, and removing layers built for private equity ownership. It adds that NI remains strategically important and that product development "continues at a strong pace".

Why are producers worried?

The worry is sharper for NI than it would be for many other software companies, because NI stopped offering offline activation in September 2017. Its support pages say any computer installing a product needs to be online to activate it through Native Access. In practice, a Komplete bundle or a shelf of Kontakt libraries is only portable to a new machine while NI's activation service is running and staffed.

That is the fear behind threads like one from a producer who had just bought Komplete 15 Standard and asked what would become of it if things went wrong. (Reddit blocks our crawler; we read the title only, not the replies.) Readers commenting under Synth Anatomy's report raised the same point about the licence server. These are users voicing a fear, not reports of failures, and the evidence base is thin: a handful of threads, not a survey.

What we think

The licence FAQ is reassuring for now. The track record is not. The same May FAQ listed iZotope among the brands that "continue" with NI, and inMusic's announcement named iZotope too. Less than two months later, iZotope belonged to a different company. The FAQ also said NI's teams were "here, building and supporting every day", and the support team is now reported gone. We don't think anyone set out to mislead: the people who wrote those pages didn't control how the administrator would split the group. That is exactly why a pre-close FAQ isn't a guarantee.

The second-order point is about who carries the risk. inMusic's logic is hardware: its May release highlighted NKS running on Akai and M-Audio controllers and NI sounds on MPC. That could be good for producers if NKS spreads. But the online-only activation that ties everything together is now a cost centre inside a company that is cutting costs. If support moves to a shared desk, the first people to feel it will be producers stuck on an activation error the night before a session. The other group exposed is the independent library makers who sell Kontakt instruments. Their products depend on a platform they don't control, and NI's FAQ gives them nothing firmer than "relationships continue".

Our advice:

• Download and back up installers for everything you own while Native Access is working. Keep invoices and serial numbers somewhere other than your NI account.
• Don't upgrade on a promise. Buy what is worth the money today, not what a roadmap might deliver.
• Weigh activation when you buy. All else being equal, offline activation or a perpetual, transferable licence is worth something real to anyone who plans to make music for a decade.

And a request to every company buying up music-tech brands, inMusic included: publish a licence-continuity pledge in writing. That means committing that activations will keep working through any change of ownership, and that if the servers are ever switched off, customers get a final offline unlock first. It costs little to promise, and after this year producers have good reason to ask for it.