You could make a pretty good case that the most important development is precisely this blurring of boundaries between creating music and (for lack of a better word) processing music.

The first samplers sort of sucked, nobody is questioning that. However, once they were mated to a sequencer a’la the early AKAI’s, things got awesome. Instead of needing an extremely expensive recording and playback lab for doing experimental work, one could now take any number of sounds and start messing around with their order, timing and duration. Also, in a pre-midi world, it helped to have something that could save and replay your precious bass and drum lines before they flash out of your machine’s RAM. Ask early acid house or techno producers about the “joy” of trying to duplicate a pattern on a TB-303 without any savable parameters.

I think it is also important to note the effect these machines had on everyday musicians. No more did you need a Kraftwerk budget to make experimental sounds. Simply head down to your music shop, grab a sampler for a thousand bucks or so (still a lot, I do concede) and start screwing around. Early electronic dance music, both in the hip-hop, techno and crossover (electro, chicago house, etc) fields benefited immensely from this technology; not to mention the beginnings of industrial rock and EBM.

So yes, even though I do love my drum machines, I think they are actually part of a larger picture that all revolves around the ability to manipulate sound on a level once reserved only for laboratories and the rich. The democratization of electronic music was a driving force in determining the next big shift in music after we all got over just how novel these newfangled electric guitars are.