Reply To: Free Sonar Tier

[LinkedMusicians]

I predicted yesterday that BandLab would probably begin offering a perpetual license for Cakewalk Sonar soon, as all signs indicate that Cakewalk Sonar is failing to make a dent in the market. While this isn’t a perpetual license they’re selling, it’s very similar from a strategic perspective. It’s still a big red flag that the product (okay, technically the products, Sonar and Next) is floundering. So the risk here is that you’ll be creating projects with a DAW that’s very likely to soon be phased out — I would guesstimate — within 12 months, and at most, 24 months, but I think the former is much more likely. A $450 million valued company isn’t going to be that patient with a product line that is clearly a failure. Investors aren’t that generous.

This is exactly the kind of stuff that I used to write about at my marketing and branding strategy publication. I did enjoy writing those articles, I just didn’t enjoy having to be prolific.

The problem started with using a brand (we’ll just call Cakewalk “the brand” and Sonar the subbrand to keep things simple). That brand and subbrand are seen by most of the market as (1) outdated, and (2) connected to their failures and the eventual closure of the brand under Gibson ownership before their intellectual capital assets were purchased by BandLab. Even more, BandLab did a very confused brand strategy in the original naming of the DAW. They first called it Cakewalk by BandLab, then went further into the past by calling it Cakewalk Sonar. It looks a lot like BandLab lacked a clear brand strategy and just made it up as they went along. They could have done much better by naming the new DAW something like BandLab Sonar. That would have paid tribute to the old DAW without confusing the market and also, conveying this product is fresh and exciting, taking this legacy brand into a new era. However, at this point, the naming not only confuses people — even the big AI platforms are confused over Cakewalk by BandLab and Cakewalk Sonar, and Google AI overviews currently says that BandLab has ceased making Cakewalk Sonar. Good thing that they’re are so few searches globally that not many people probably see that.

If the branding strategy wasn’t bad enough on its own, add to it that when BandLab resurrects the brand name, it does it with the subscription-only model, a model which every developer in this industry should know — without having to spend a cent on primary research — is not at all popular with this market. And when the market tries to tell BandLab that it wants a perpetual license version, what does BandLab do? It not only plugs its ears, it mocks and censors them.

BandLab is truly worthy of an MBA case study in brand, marketing, and social media mismanagement. I think a fraction of the former Cakewalk by BandLab users will pick this up and a similar amount of BandLab users that would have otherwise used the free Cakewalk by BandLab.  But for those who’ve moved on after the company went subscription-only, I think most will not return. IMO, this freebie is only worthwhile for those who can’t afford a paid DAW and can accept the risk that this DAW will very likely not be around two years from now in any form. It’s a significant sign that even the micro influencers that were promoting Cakewalk by BandLab have moved on, and the only ones that are now promoting Cakewalk Sonar are seeing extremely low view rates — often struggling to get to 1,000 views. Google searches on ‘cakewalk sonar” are similarly low (I would cite AI mentions, but I actually ran the numbers on Google searches before writing this, and they’re very low) .

Mark my words. Easily gone in less than two years, but very likely, gone within the next 12 months. This move tells you that they’ve failed and are so desperate to gain market share that they feel the only viable path is to give the product away. But they already did that and then retreated. It’s a symphony of brand, product, marketing strategy and customer relations mistakes that I don’t think they can realistically turn around at this point. They’ve made too many mistakes.

Even so, I will likely still be putting this on a list of the best free DAWs in the future, as I think it is. I just don’t think it will be around long.

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