Reply To: Yet another staunch Cakewalk supporter bails

[superabbit]

One of my favorite subjects is the history of musical equipment brands and companies.

My stepdad was a management consultant who specialized at brand/company rescue back in the 70’s. He worked at Booz, Allen, and Hamilton and at Stanford Research International among other places. He instilled in me a fascination for how brands and companies can go off the rails (and maybe if they’re lucky, get back on track).

That was a time when the big corporate buzzword was DIVERSIFICATION. The idea was that the last thing you wanted as a healthy corporation was to be caught with all your eggs in one basket if technology or fashion changed.

It was a time that saw huge upheavals in both of these areas. The economy and politics post WWII begat two things that drove this. For technology, there was the space program, for fashion, a big population bulge of younger people (the baby boom). There were plenty of others, of course, but in my thinking (and memory) these were the big examples.

So every corporation was scrambling to acquire smaller companies. One well-known example was the Columbia Broadcasting System with its acquisition of multiple musical instrument brands. Fender guitars and amplifiers, Rhodes pianos, Rogers drums. They had been successful at selling musical entertainment, maybe someone there thought that selling the tools used to make that entertainment was a good fit.

A thing that tends to happen with corporate acquisitions is that the acquiring company goes in with the belief that whatever company they are buying will greatly benefit from the acquiring company’s knowhow. After all, they are the ones able to entirely buy the other company, so obviously they know how to make a business successful. To take them into the big time, they have executives with greater experience in finance, manufacturing, and other things that the acquired company, founded by, for instance, a radio repairman, may be lacking.

Fair enough.

Where it tended to fall apart was in understanding the market the acquired company was operating in. The aforementioned radio repairman with his pocket protector who took his managers out to lunch at Carl’s Jr. also happened to be a music fan who lived near the entertainment capitol of the world and loved having musicians like his favorite, Bob Wills, stop in while on tour and talk about what they like and want. He was also surrounded by a labor pool of skilled electronics assemblers who had learned their chops during the war. Fender amps were “built like tanks” partly because some of the people who assembled them had done the same thing for defense subcontractors.

(The reason your tube amp has a standby switch isn’t to baby the tubes at startup. Which is why it’s called a “standby” switch. The switch was at first only present on Fender amps and amps that copied Fender (like Marshall) because touring dance bands at the time played two sets with a break between them. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys wanted to leave their amps powered up during their breaks so they could come back on stage and get playing without having to stand around and wait for them to warm up. Also, having the tubes on heater-only does prevent a small bit of tube wear, but that wasn’t the main reason.)

The executives at the acquiring company may be completely innocent of any clue about the marketplace the acquired company operates in and the things that made the company desirable enough to buy in the first place. But the term “Dunning-Kruger Effect” didn’t exist back then, and besides, what ambitious executive was going to admit that a radio repairman and his team of nerds and Mexican immigrants could possibly know anything that they themselves didn’t?

Another issue was that the pool of young ambitious executives at CBS had landed dream jobs at CBS because they wanted to work in New York in television, radio, and records. Being sent to Anaheim, California to run a manufacturing operation seemed like it would put an end to that career path. They put the instrument manufacturing under an umbrella with Columbia Records. Was Goddard Lieberson going to send his top talent away to California? There’s a reason why even I don’t know the names of any of the CBS executives who headed up the musical instruments division. I can tell you the names of people who worked on the assembly line, even about their later careers, but not a single CBS Instruments division head.

Most know how it played out. 15 years later Fender was almost at the point of failure when CBS dumped the brand and manufacturing assets to company employees at a huge loss. By that time the manufacturing tooling was completely shot and Fender had to cease making guitars for a while. It took many more years to restore the line of legendary tube amps. Rogers and Rhodes were killed off and are now zombie brands. The company employees who bought the brand because they couldn’t stand to see it go under turned it into the largest and most successful instrument manufacturer in the world. Amazing what experienced people who love what they’re doing can accomplish.

I have no insider information on what is/was going on with the BandLab company or its Cakewalk brand. They make Cakewalk, they make Sonar, they make Next. Desktop apps all.

I think that there’s a greater than zero possibility that the person at headquarters now in charge of the Cakewalk brand and its products never wanted to have to deal with selling application software for desktop computers. Even someone brilliant at building social media brands might not have the first clue (or enthusiasm) about marketing desktop software. Why would they? What would be their motivation to learn? Is the big bright sexy future in desktop apps?

You can still make some money there, but when was the last time a new desktop app that wasn’t a game became a household word? Microsoft Office still is, but it came out 35 years ago. Photoshop still is. Also 35 years ago.

Desktop apps are now like woodworking tools or electronic tools or photography equipment or musical instruments or sporting equipment. People seeking corporate glamor in the tech business don’t get MBA’s in order to work in desktop applications.

BandLab is a big successful music-oriented web and mobile app platform. Sign up for their paid plan and you get to use a couple of apps you can use on a computer, if you happen to have one for school or gaming.

Do you think the person calling the marketing shots for Cakewalk has ever been in a recording studio? Have they ever used a desktop music app?

What would they do if one of their many tasks was to find something useful to do with Sonar and Next? What would they say after taking a look at the way the forum was in its more hands-off state?

A question that I almost dare not ask: what would you think if the Cakewalk development team were to buy Sonar from BandLab? It wouldn’t be without precedent in the software industry or in the musical equipment industry. Could they repair the holes in the ship’s hull and get it sailing again?

-Erik
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superabbit.bandcamp.com

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