2026 Has Been a Year of Massive Decline for Legacy Music Creator Forums and a Clear Shift to Newer Social Platforms

I started LinkedMusicians as a social media platform with an acute awareness that legacy plugin, composer, and music tech forums (e.g, KVR, VI Control, etc.) are in significant decline. For more than a decade, legacy forums have been struggling to maintain their aging base and failing to attract new and younger users. Basically, they’re clinging to their very older users and not growing. But 2026 has been a really stunning year of decline. The latest figures are especially worth noting:

Monthly Organic (non-paid) Search Engine Traffic:
Gearspace: 144,600
KVR: 25,400
VI-Control: 26,600
Cakewalk Discuss Forums: 4,900

Source: Ahrefs

By contrast, while we opened LinkedMusic as a non-toxic social media platform for music creators in 2025, we were seeing from 12k to 20k+ active users per month (that’s not the same as the above metrics, which are only from organic search engines and don’t include repeat visitors; so if you’ve bookmarked a site, it’s not included in the above numbers; their total visitors of these established platforms are significantly higher. But look at the forum we grew out of, Cakewalk Discuss and compare their average views (publicly shown). Cakewalk Discuss Forum threads average less than 100 views. Even our small but growing subreddit’s average post sees between 200 – 300 plus views and we’re consistently growing and are on track to see the same amount of registered users we had on the site within several weeks.

Now, there are many reasons for all of this. The first is,Reddit is the evolution of legacy forums and is consistently one of the most popular sites on the web. Combine that with the fact that the audience is already on Reddit and when you’re at Reddit, it’s very easy for people to find other subreddits. Contrast that with the significant decrease all sites are seeing from search traffic and LLM (AI search) traffic is even more elusive. In short, you need to be where the people are at and the trend away from legacy forums have long been fighting merely to retain their users and not seeing growth — it’s clear that they’re fighting a losing battle. I was looking at the trends for these sites in 2026, and it’s a much sharper decline than ever. Out of all of them, Gearspace is doing the best at retaining its position, but it isn’t growing.

It’s easy to explain. Legacy forums in this space are retaining older users, largely Baby Boomers who have been using the forum UI for decades and are a group that is solidly resistant to change. Millennials and younger generations regularly use platforms like Reddit, Discord, and Instagram, where they have been enjoying various types of content and see the outdated forum UIs as from a bygone era. You could make the case that younger generations are using what is familiar to the early web generation forums their parents used.

On another level, because the big social media platforms have a wide range of content, even older generation users end up trying them out, and when they do, they sometimes will find more active, vibrant communities that can end up replacing the legacy forums they’ve used in this space — that’s why there’s no safety for these legacy forums. For a quick example, for those of us from the Cakrwalk Discuss Forum, take a look at the Cakewalk subreddit, which isn’t managed by BandLab, so it’s not the heavy-handed environment where any mentions of the company’s competitors are censored and even LinkedMusicians, a hobby site, is considered a competitor. While all social media connected to Cakewalk is, to be candid, are ghost towns for a software brand with a value of roughly $450 million USD, the Cakewalk subreddit is much more active than their own Cakewalk Discuss Forum and the subreddit clearly is much more diverse and not regularly making political and bigoted posts that regularly occur in the Cakewalk Discuss Forums.