Blue Microphones got its start building high-end studio microphones for the recording industry, making a name for itself as a niche player. But niche no more. With a nudge from Apple Inc., the Westlake Village company built a low-cost microphone for use with music recording software.
That mic, called the Snowball, has become a hit with aspiring pro musicians and dedicated hobbyists who make demo recordings on their laptops instead of shelling out $50 an hour or more for studio time.
The company projects $10 million in sales this year, double what it did last year and up from $3 million in 2007. What's more, its higher profile helped draw the attention of Los Angeles private equity firm Transom Capital Group, which bought Blue from founders Skipper Wise and Martins Saulespurens for an undisclosed amount in April 2008.
Transom is betting that Blue will expand its market beyond the musicians who have taken it this far. Its products can be used to record podcasts, soundtracks for videos and audio for videoconferences. It also offers an HD webcam.
“Blue is in the position to take recording from this rarefied thing only recording artists know about to something that can integrate into your life just as much as your digital camera does," said Russ Roenick, a managing director at Transom. “A child can use our mics or an 18-year-old can upload their video and audio on Facebook."
That vision is dramatically different from what the company founders had in mind when they started Blue Microphones in 1995.
Then, Wise was a jazz musician recording and producing for companies including Cypress Records. He had met Saulespurens during recording sessions in Europe in the mid-1980s, when Saulespurens was an audio engineer at the Latvian Conservatory of Music.
Saulespurens found his way to the States, and the two men started Blue on a shoestring budget a few years later, at first repairing vintage microphones from the 1950s and '60s and then advancing to building their own mics.
The name “Blue" is a tip of the hat to Saulespurens' homeland: It's an acronym for Baltic Latvian Universal Electronics.
