oh, but neither am i? here ya go
 

bloomberg
Billionaire's 28-Year-Old Son Picks Digital Music Empire Over Palm-Oil RichesByYoolim Lee
 
Kuok Meng Ru didn't spend much time with his billionaire father when he was growing up.
As the third child of an agribusiness tycoon, he was sent off to a British boarding school at 10, graduating later from Cambridge University with a mathematics degree.
His father Kuok Khoon Hong was busy building Wilmar International Ltd. into the world’s largest palm-oil business, starting from scratch in 1991. His mother constantly reminded him: "Much has been given, much will be expected."
Yet it was the father who introduced his son to Eric Clapton's music. That led to an obsession with B.B. King and a love affair with the blues guitar.
"I always felt like I had a personal relationship with him," Kuok said of the late guitarist.
[pic]

Kuok Meng Ru, founder of Bandlab.
Photographer: Sam Kang Li/Bloomberg
It's no surprise then that the younger Kuok, now based in Singapore, chose to go into the music business instead of the family business. The 28-year-old and his partner Steve Skillings are working to turn their startup BandLab into a global cloud-based community for people to create, collaborate and share music.
BandLab is being funded by a group of private investors that include Kuok's father and JamHub Corp., a maker of audio mixers. Kuok declined to say how much investment is going into BandLab, but said the startup is fully funded until 2019. By then, BandLab will probably have about 100 employees, double its number now, he said.
Their approach is similar to Instagram, where there's a thriving community of people sharing photographs. Bandlab is betting that people will want to do something similar with their music. BandLab debuted (for web, Android and Apple iOS devices) in August 2015 and is generating millions of dollars in annual revenue, according to Kuok. The startup is aiming to be the social network of choice for fans and musicians.
"We want to bring that simplicity and convenience to the people who make music," Kuok said in an interview at BandLab's office, where about 40 employees, mostly software developers, work side-by-side.
Unlike SoundCloud, where users share completed songs, BandLab lets aspiring artists seek feedback or collaboration for works in progress, publicly or privately. If a joint effort takes off, it’s easy to track contributors, helping to avoid copyright issues. One group on BandLab has 50 rappers and musicians from 15 countries working on a song together.
"Ultimately the two most important things for artist is to make music and have people listen to their music," said Mark Mulligan, a London-based digital music analyst at Midia Research. A key challenge for BandLab now is to scale the business and amass listeners, he said. "The actual people who create music, there is absolutely a market for this, but it’s a much smaller number of people. There's always going to be far bigger audience than contents being created."
BandLab isn't Kuok’s only musical endeavor. He's also turning Swee Lee, a sleepy 70-year-old distributor of guitar and audio equipment in Singapore, into a modern enterprise, selling merchandise online and offering music lessons. It's now the biggest distributor of instruments and audio equipment in Southeast Asia, with shops in Malaysia, Myanmar and Vietnam. Sales have doubled since he bought the company in 2012. Swee Lee is also where Kuok bought his first guitar. Kuok declined to say how much it cost to buy Swee Lee.
[pic]

Kuok Khoon Hong, chairman and chief executive officer of Wilmar International.

Photographer: Munshi Ahmed/Bloomberg
Kuok’s efforts, backed by his father, also underscore the fact that he’s part of a bigger dynasty that goes beyond palm oil. The older Kuok is a nephew of Robert Kuok, one of the richest men in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Worth $13.2 billion, the family patriarch controls businesses from sugar and fertilizers to hotels and logistics companies.
While the blues-playing younger Kuok acknowledged his family's support, he said that much of the clan's success came from taking risks and setting out on their own. His father mortgaged his apartment at the age of 40 to start Wilmar, Kuok said.
"We don’t believe in entitlement," said Kuok, who declined to say how much of his funding came directly from his father. "Our family is about, 'You earn what you build. You will get support but you need to deserve it.' My father built his business in my lifetime. Having witnessed firsthand that building something meaningful takes time, it’s incredibly important to be aware that overnight success is the exception, not the rule."
Kuok said he also learned about hard work from his other role model, B.B. King. In 2011, he went to his first (and last) concert by the blues guitarist.
"His success came after years of touring experience and hard craft," Kuok said. "That’s something we try to bring in everything we do at BandLab."
—With assistance from Sterling Wong.

pwalpwal
to be fair, these questions have been asked and speculated about a few times, but bandlab themselves never answered, you can find these threads easily... as for actual information the most can be found in a pre-cakewalk-aquisition article from bloomberg, google it, (tl/dr; bandlab's a startup with funding until 2019, at the time the bloomberg article was written) oh, i googled it for you
/hth

Thanks

Euthymia
Why not read the bazillion other threads that have beaten this same topic to a pulp over the last 4 months?
 
Since I'm weary of explaining this every time to someone who's never experienced a business model where you're given something for free in order to interest you in an upsell, for instance the peanuts at Five Guys or the coffee at Trader Joe's, or any number of free apps on iOS, or Dropbox, Google Drive, Mega, Evernote, etc., I'm just going to keep this around and paste it in:
 
In my guitar amp repair business, I've been using Google Voice for 5 years now as my business phone line. I was able to get 510-747-TUBE, which may be the coolest phone number for a guitar amp repair business ever, if I may humbly say so. It has not cost me a cent. I can text with it, get voice mail with (often amusing) voice-to-text translations, all kinds of features.

I've written lyrics using Google Docs. Shared rough mixes and stems via Google Drive. All free. Never paid them anything. Google Docs, Google Voice, and Google Drive, none of them have ads. These are all services that offer upsells if I decide that I need greater capacity from them, and many do. Google can easily afford to give me what I get for free while they make a fortune selling other companies the greater capacity.

Sometimes people bring me amps that have nothing more wrong with them than dirty input jacks, and I'll shoot a bit of DeOxit in the jack, wiggle the plug around, then shoot the 5hit with them about their band, and send them on their way no charge and very happy that they came to Euthymia Electronics and not some other place. No motive other than creating good will and knowing that it will spread the word that Erik is offering a good product.

Just because BandLab are licensing a product without charging for it that other companies used to charge money for doesn't mean they are not already making money from it. Just learning about the existence of BandLab has caused me to talk it up to several people. Multiply that by however many people have downloaded and started using the program and it adds up to some very precisely targeted advertising.

In our studios, people who don't understand how we do what we are do trust us that we know what we're doing. Can't we give BandLab the same benefit of the doubt? Every company before them had a pay license model for Cakewalk software and look how it ended with SONAR.
 
Cakewalk by BandLab has only been in existence as a program for what, 4 months, and it's already way better as far as stability, and nice small handy features have been added rather than big "who is actually going to use this?" features. Although we are hurting for a phrase sampler. The youth of today need phrase samplers.

I'm salivating waiting for them to put out the plug-ins that Cakewalk used to bundle with Platinum and sell separately, and still tantalizingly advertise on the website. The Channel Tools, that fancy L-Phase EQ and Multiband Compressor, some more ProChannel modules, they could make some coin from me in the future with "in-app purchases."

I'd love to have a BandLab-developed Dynamic EQ with corresponding ProChannel module, for instance.
 
As far as comfort about having paid for a license for software that is now being licensed for free, there was a LOT of software bundled with SONAR Platinum that is not included with Cakewalk by BandLab. Software that as stated above, I will consider paying for if BandLab start licensing it in the future. SONAR Platinum was a package and part of that package has been changed and further developed and improved and is being licensed for free for all to use including people who bought the SONAR Platinum package. So? I get that part for free, but it doesn't have the sunroof, air conditioner, fancy rims, sound system, trim package, heated leather seats, turbocharger, and tinted glass. If I want any of that, I have to add it myself.
 
Don't worry. Use this fantastic program that these nice folks are giving us to make great sounds. It's back and it's better!

Thanks for the write up. Very influential.

Very enlightening. Thanks for posting article pwalpwal. Meng seems like a great guy to be at the helm of this enterprise.

FL users are still paranoid about their lifetime updates and keep offering Image Line financial suggestions and their reply is we're fine and in the red.

@kitekrazy1 Talking about FLS, I have some beautiful quotes from the IL forum where a central figure spells out lifetime updates for what it is. A meaningless term, usable only for marketing. I also register that the most recent EULA now clearly defines the term "Lifetime free updates". There is something in the air.