The problem is that it gets better, it wasn't good on public release, now it is decent, companies are investing everything into improving agents, this means in 5 years you can sit on your couch drinking tea and give voice instructions to the agent to do stuff on your computer without failing or just let it act on its own, this is assuming technology improves, it will improve for sure, but noone can say by how much.

 

I think it's a mixing engineer's survey and not musician's, no way that musicians are using ProTools
Show me 1 musician who uses DaVinci's Fairlight

check this:
https://audiosex.pro/threads/year-end-accounting-what-daw-os-software-are-you-using-results.68424/
(non representative, of course, but much likely true)

 

Last edited: Jan 7, 2026 at 10:03 AM

When I started 2008 making music, I tested several DAWs like Cubase and Sonar, but bought FL Studio for €89. Easy to use and lifetime free updates!

The skins that were installed usually didn't cover the entire top bar, and I was back to Olive Green. All my pleas and begging to finally get a different GUI were finally answered with FL Studio 12 (2015)! The UI became vectorial, which allowed for better scaling and limited the old bitmap skin system. From then on, the default look was grayer/darker and less dominated by green.

Here is the text from the 2008 invoice: IMAGE-LINE FL Studio I Fruity Loops, Virtual Pattern-Based Recording Studio, Software-Based Synthesizers (TS404 Analog Bassline Synthesizer, Granular Synthesizer and Fruity Loops Sampler), DXi and VSTi Synthesizer Support, DirectX and VSTFX Support, for Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP

 

Last edited: Jan 7, 2026 at 9:13 AM

Well, the market is supersaturated with everything and anything under the sun hundreds of thousands of every plugin and DAW doing the same thing exact thing and all of them all competing for your money, and claiming to be the absolute ultimate best in the entire universe, Let's get real it's the way business works If you have a great innovative product and sales are really going through the roof. then comes in other companies making the same product, how long will you continue to make money, before shutting down, merging, selling the business. Constant neverending updates drive me crazy, ok this month the gui is plaid with lemondrop controls and a few flashing lights or other BS. My 2 work PC's never go online if I do put a new in plugin them and it works perfectly it stays that way, no updates. I'm using mainly old plugins and even freebies. I try the newer plugins and stuff on a general and net use PC for the fun of it, and it keeps me busy as a hobby. To be perfectly honest I don't give a damn if all the software plugin companies shut down, I have whatever I need but most of all I am a musician , I play real instruments with real equipment. May all of you who have a great musically inspired 2026. Sorry about the overlong drawn out ranting I'm just a really miserable old grouch.

 

Hit the brakes and slam on the brakes, stop, and reconsider the entire update. The solution will have to be an UPDATE STOP.
Disengage from the madness, stop reading industry news, make a backup—secure what you have at home and enjoy it.
Those at the top will keep going until they either drop dead or go bankrupt.

A not-so-serious glimpse into the future:

It's about time the multibillionaire Elon Musk bought a few companies:
Steinberg and Yamaha will then become Elon's YamBerg v1.0!

Perhaps the rest of the industry will then also be bought up by a hedge fund or Google. So that at the end of the century, we'll see this DAW:
The new multi-DAW system in conjunction with Windows, macOS, and Linux, all from a single source, just one device for everything.

The ad could look something like this:

The money from BlackRock and Google, the know-how of FL Studio and Steinberg, etc., merge into a single DAW with a variable operating system. With a mouse click, you can switch between Pro Tools, FL Studio, Studio One, Ableton, and Logic. Of course, you can only rent all of this, because people are so poor anyway, for €9.99 a month!

 

My guess is that they bought it because it’s the cleanest bridge between creation and monetization they could acquire. If you think of Mastering as a company's shipping department, a Loopcloud/Splice, etc. type thing is the dock. Buying Reason is like buying a ready-made front door.

Reason is already SaaS, and almost totally encapsulated. It is generative, but provably not AI generative. That is totally the opposite of what Suno, etc. are doing. You can look right at a project built in Reason and know where nearly everything in it came from, if not prove it. They wouldn't make this sort of a move just to compete with other DAW applications.

 

It reminds me of the Stallone film Demolition Man where every restaurant is Taco Bell.

 

ha! 9.99, yah right! we're looking at minimum 25 bucks a month.

 

Let's create a new one for 2026.

 

Absolutely not imho. Moreover Complex is only monophonic!! Diva sounds far more analog and is a poly synth, just like The Legend from Synapse.

 

First, you write "I think," now you say "I'm sure." No article, no professional media authored graphs or pie charts, no user base numbers. What prompted the change from "I think" to "I'm sure?"

 

Either RMA, the Recording Academy, AES or TEC (NAMM) if memory serves. I'm on a lot of industry email lists.

As far as beliefs, lots of those going around (e.g., that Spinach has 10-100x the amount of iron it does, or that carrots give superior vision, or that vitamin C helps fend off colds and flu - all proven to be myths, or a hoax in the case of carrots).

Anyway, best I can guess is this survey might factor in paying customers only. No way to gauge "unregistered" market penetration is there.

Lastly, the graph might be G7 or G20 countries only. If you live in Pakistan or Indonesia, or China, your "beliefs" may vary (they usually do depending on location and exposure).

Neither was I - maybe studio owners/managers only - not much I can do about it. Are you a member of the Academy, AES, NAMM or RMA?

 

Its from https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/2025-daw-survey-the-results a website that used to be called.... ready!.... wait for it! https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/ So clearly there's no bias here.

Using a survey that was done on a site that used to be dedicated to Pro Tools as your metric is probably not the best idea.

 

There really are no reliable figures; how is the statistician supposed to know what people have just installed or deleted?
Attached are two pictures of Thomann's sales ranking for 2026!

Year End Accounting 2022 - What DAW, OS & Software are you using? Results

DAW (Digital Audio Workstation)

01) Reaper 24x
02) Ableton 21x
03) Studio One 18x
04) Cubase 14x
05) Fl Studio 9x
06) Logic Pro 9x
07) Pro Tools 9x
08) Bitwig Studio 8x
09) BandLab Cakewalk 6x
10) Nuendo 4x
11) Magix 3x
12) Mixcraft 2x
13) Reason 2x
14) Renoise 2x
15) Audition 1x
16) Luna 1x
17) Harrison Mixbus 1x
18) Tracktion Waveform 1x

https://audiosex.pro/threads/year-end-accounting-what-daw-os-software-are-you-using-results.68424/

 

I never really cared about the lack of VST's. I liked the fact that you were constrained. It was a great set of tools and allowed me to focus on making music rather than playing with upgrades and new apps.

It was the subscription model that killed Reason for me.

 

imho Reason is dead when Propellerhead stop and "Reason Studios" started.

 

In my view, Reason started to lose a bit of its shine when Propellerhead decided — whether out of conviction or necessity — to link up with an investment company. Investor-driven businesses tend to focus first and foremost on growing capital and hitting revenue targets within a set timeframe. Naturally, that shifts priorities, and long-term product vision often comes second.

Together with a changing market and maybe a touch of overconfidence, it becomes easy to drift away from what made the product special in the first place. Many Reason users picked up on this fairly early, even if you don’t really want to accept it — especially after investing heavily in the ecosystem and convincing yourself that everything is still fine.

With Reason Studios being acquired by LANDR, it now seems obvious that continuing without a strong partner simply wasn’t financially viable anymore. The DAW market has become extremely crowded, and there’s no shortage of plugins all solving more or less the same problems. For a small company, delivering truly new ideas under those conditions is incredibly hard.

To their credit, they did manage to impress the user base more than once with various Rack Extensions — but in the end, much of it felt like familiar ground. Now AI enters the picture as the next big step, and at this point nobody can really say whether it will turn out to be a blessing or a curse.

Rather than letting momentum fade and watching one of the most distinctive audio platforms slowly lose relevance, a partnership like this may have been the only realistic option left. I’m curious to see where this leads and I genuinely hope they’ve chosen the right path forward - specially since I’ve personally invested a considerable amount into the Reason ecosystem over the years.

 

What is even more ironic, is that I still have the original DVD somewhere of this movie and it says "Now all restaurants are called Pizza Hut"..
Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC are all owned by the same corporate... as I suggested ironic considering the topic of this thread.