Reply To: Yet another staunch Cakewalk supporter bails

[Peter DeLegge]

Everything you can discern from BandLab, they’re primary target market is a much younger demographic than us. In my emails with Ashwin, their social media manager, shared that BandLab corporate realizes that having their software team manage their “legacy forums” is not working out great, but Ashwin stressed how corporate didn’t want to just take it away from the software team and stressed with me to be patient — after I was banned for not even violating any policy. I had merely told an employee that he needed to apologize to forum users for berating then and my post that got me a lifetime ban merely explained to el diablo that cclarry was okay, he just disagreed with the new Cakewalk Forum policy and that both of us were at another forum — that, written knowing that Sasor would approve it before it most and writing it to make it past him — was what got me a lifetime ban. I wish I copied it. Because Jonathan never approved it, he merely banned me claiming that it was hostile to a band lab employee (I suppose him, even though it didn’t reference or refer to him or any other BandLab employee).

As a former Fortune 200 business strategist (yep, I left the marketing world for a time) that spent some time analyzing corporations for acquisitions (I’ll name one of the potential acquisitions I killed off, Intuit), there are some things that are very apparent. BandLab is primarily focused on a younger demographic then us. They’re not spending much money to market to our demographic or spending on marketing Sonar — and they’ve raised a lot from investors. Even more, based on their pricing changes,  it’s clear that their subscription-only strategy isn’t meeting their expectations.

Here’s what I believe is ahead: BandLab will close the Cakewalk Forums in the next 12 months, probably much sooner. BandLab will move back to perpetual licenses. However, my instincts are that Sonar will be gone within the next two years as BandLab has done too much brand damage that is too well known among DAW users. Gaining back trust is extremely difficult for any brand with a bad reputation. They’d be better off using a different brand name to rebuild at this point. After BandLab shuts down Sonar — which I think is almost certain to happen — they’ll focus on their Next product or perhaps even purchase another DAW that has a decent user base. But the writing is on the wall for Cakewalk Forums and Sonar. They’re kind of like Bruce Willis character in “The Sixth Sense” — they’re still walking around, but their dead. They just aren’t aware of it yet.

I think Meng is a typical billionaire trust fund kid. He knows how to buy things with his dad’s money, but he doesn’t know how to successfully run them.  BandLab’s strategy with Cakewalk literally could make for a good MBA level case study of what happens when a business doesn’t have a solid and clear strategy and management doesn’t understand the fundamentals of brand and marketing strategy; at minimum. the execution is terrible. It’s a much bigger story than their mismanagement of their forum. That only happened because their management is a mess. No competently managed brand could permit that to happen.

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