Interesting info on Roland's sale of Cakewalk to Gibson...

mettelus
Interesting find. The sales numbers sort of shocked me in that (10,307 for CY2010), since I would *assume* that is any product (Producer, Studio, Basic, Music Creator, Z3TA+2, ProChannels, etc.). 

The 10,307 is in thousands, so 10,307,000
 

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bitflipper
Interesting take on electronic vs. classic forms. It sure does seem like most popular music is created on a laptop these days. Especially in Asia, where it's close to 100%.
 
Talking to guitar aficionados, the consensus is that guitar sales are generally down - with the exception of cheap Chinese knockoffs, which are doing well. Kids coming up may still be buying guitars, but they aren't Strats and Les Pauls. Fender may not be in as bad a shape as Gibson, and is slowly doing better, but they're still $100,000,000 in debt with flat or declining sales.

I think the broader issue is that for Millenials+, even kids since the mid/late 90s .. with the advent of X Factor etc .. the concept of starting a PROPER band and gigging and recording and doing your own material has been dying / died?
 
Too much effort, as is sitting down at a DAW and actually creating, not just music by numbers with pre built samples. No instant gratification, attention time span short!
 
Add to that all kids, teens now use MOBILES .. the Desktop is dead and the laptop maybe soon too. I still dont believe you can create properly on a mobile device with a small screen and a crap mini jack Audio I/O.
 
Who needs a guitar now. Just create a boy band with someone else writing the material via a Swedish hit factory.
 
Now add further THE VALUE OF MUSIC to the current generation. Its ZERO. Its all "FREE" via youtube or torrent. AND it has to be a hit for anyone to even take an interest in it even for FREE.
 
I was in bands since the 80s. We went to see bands every where possible, even if we did not know there material. If we heard a cover, that was booed off. Had to be new, original. We listened to ALBUMS and treasured them, we went well beyond the SINGLE. I finished up playing in 2010, for many years before that I watched kids coming to pubs and venues, passing by the band while on there phone, no interest in live music or the concept of playing a live instrument. I jacked it in 2010 because the recession came, the money you got from venues dropped to not worth it ( for the travel etc ). 
 
So you can see why its very very difficult for music these days .. DAWs and music software in difficulty is just a symptom of a way wider issue that I cannot see fixing itself any time soon
 
 
 
 

Personally, I'm inclined to be careful about reaching firm or sweeping conclusions about any of this stuff. The press release by Roland is a snapshot of Cakewalk's fortunes from half a decade ago, and while I suspect things did not improve for the better since that time, I don't actually know. And there is no data that I can find that offers any clue as to the state of affairs today.
 
It looks, to my eyes, like Gibson was buying Cakewalk for the intellectual assets and maybe the talent, but was not buying Cakewalk for the name or the market cache associated with it. They were going to merge it with Tascam, and let Tascam's brand be the face of the company. Something changed, however, and the idea was dropped. Hard to know why, but there could be an entire host of reasons, running the gamut from fair to foul.
 
As for Cakewalk itself - who knows why the last few years worth of decisions were made. Could it have been a cynical attempt to hoover as much money out of a loyal user base as possible before the company drove off the cliff? Sure. Could it, instead, have been a desperate attempt to keep a beloved product afloat by taking a daring chance with the revenue model? Yes. With either approach, the results would look the same to us, but the underlying reasons are polar opposites. I don't know enough about the folks involved to make even a slightly educated guess about any of that. All I know of Cakewalk's personnel are the responses I see on the forum, and the press releases from the website. I do get the distinct vibe, however, that the folks who worked there really did love their jobs, were invested in the product and the long-time employees devoted a lot of their adult lives to developing it. And I get the sense that they were well respected in the broader audio technology industry.
 
Like a lot of folks here, I'm heartbroken that Cakewalk -- which I have used for 20 years -- is seemingly done. But I'd guess that those who worked on it for so long are hurting more than we are. They just saw a career's worth of hard work and personal investment evaporate overnight.
 
There are way too many unknowns to reach any firm conclusions about, well, anything. I think it would be best to reserve any conclusions or condemnations until more information comes our way. Eventually, it will - either from Cakewalk's remaining folks, or from other news and industry sources. The Roland press release I found struck me as an interesting glimpse into the scope and scale of Cakewalk's finances and value as a company -- something I didn't even have a clue about. Considering all that is going on, its very intriguing information. But I don't think its nearly enough to give us any real insight to what has happened since.

AT
 
Or maybe Cakewalk is just the first of several DAW bankruptcies in the shrinking world of professional music.  Soon it will be down to Garage Band and ....

I hope you are not correct but this is what I suspect.
Its been a pleasure AT. Ive always enjoyed your knowledge and wisdom, advice.
Hope to see you on the other side in another forum someday.
 
I will miss you all dearly.
 
The software was only half the perc.
This forum was the real Gem.
 
- Chuck E Baby

mister happy
 
The fact is that Gibson, probably the infamous CEO himself, stepped in as an ANGEL INVESTOR and provided Cakewalk with several more years of opportunity to balance the situation.
 
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In any event, Gibson was an angel investor that saved Cakewalk and gave it a chance to survive. It bought Cakewalk when no one else could afford to touch it. It must have been a great struggle to justify a sponsorship such as this. We will never know how much money Gibson wasted in an attempt to keep Cakewalk afloat while users continued to enjoy receiving product.
 
I appreciate Gibson for having tried. 
 
Thank you.

This. ^
 
A public company would probably not have bought Cakewalk from Roland (unless they were just raiding the intellectual property). DAW's are a fairly mature market with a number of competitors. And the entry level is now phones and tablets with apps that offer far more functionality than we all started out with and can offer multitracking with excellent sound quality, but cost very little money. This makes it harder to attract new customers, as the cost of upgrading is significant for people that are used to buying apps that cost 5-10 times as much for sometimes the exact same thing as the VST equivalent.
 
 
They tried their best to make it successful, but apparently could not connect well enough with the marketplace that exists. And we also know that a number of people were displeased when X1 was released and quite a few of them turned elsewhere. Couple this with the fact that not everyone always upgrades to begin with and the more mature a product is, the less compelling upgrading becomes. 
 
It's a tough business.