Reply To: Free Sonar Tier

[superabbit]

Ah, Peter.

You’re making the mistake that I did for so many years, even after the way premature announcement of Sonar: you’re evaluating and predicting the actions of BandLab management in the context of how you would be thinking. Which is, I think, “what would I do if I wanted my investment in IP and subsequent development to deliver the greatest ROI?” Whether that ROI be in measurable cash taken in or brand good will.

When it became obvious that the first objective was being ignored, I assumed that they were going for the second objective.

In my own many decades of observing corporate and brand management successes and failures, starting with being the stepson of a management consultant who worked for Booz, Allen, and Hamilton and Stanford Research as well as being a fairly successful freelancer.

This relationship began in the 1970’s, when large corporations “diversifying” by buying up companies that had only passing connections to their own core businesses was all the rage.This is the period that gave us CBS-owned Fender Musical Instruments, AMF Voit-owned Harley Davidson (the world needed lightweight Harley dirtbikes, didn’t it? Didn’t it?), Baldwin-owned Gretsch, ad nauseum.

These acquisitions may have seemed like good ideas at first, after all, how different can piano manufacturing and marketing be from guitar and drum manufacturing and marketing? (spoiler: PLENTY, if you stop and think about it for more than 60 seconds).

With few exceptions (and none that I can think of), the only successes are when the acquiring company is serious about keeping the management and staff that made the acquired company desirable in the first place. This is now better understood, but 50 years ago there was a more macho mentality of “our people are obviously smarter; if they knew what they were doing, they would be buying US, haw haw haw.”

This attitude afforded much in the way of schadenfreude, but at the cost of many great brands whose absence is still felt (Slingerland, Rogers, Rhodes, etc.). Even Fender was on virtual life support for most of the 1980’s.

One of the first business biographies I ever read was the autobiography Clive Davis wrote after leaving Columbia Records. I learned a LOT from that. Columbia/CBS was a company that worked miracles as a New York-based producer, distributor, and manufacturer of movies, TV, radio, and music. At some point, someone decided that they weren’t diversified enough, so they went shopping for entertainment-related businesses they might acquire.

Leo Fender was deep into a hypochondriac response to his company having grown bigger than he felt comfortable with and was looking to sell. Apparently Rogers Drums was as well, so CBS snapped them up and moved Rogers design and manufacturing to the Fender plant in California. CBS apparently thought that making and selling musical instruments had synergy with producing and selling musical entertainment.

The big problem was that it actually didn’t. One of the worst miscalculations was around who CBS would appoint to manage the MI division. While you might think that ambitious executives would line up for such an opportunity, you would be wrong wrong wrong. CBS was full of ambitious young management hopefuls who had gotten jobs there because they wanted a glamorous career in the entertainment business in New York. To be sent to Anaheim, California to run a guitar factory was seen as career-ending punishment. Especially in those days when New York was still the broadcasting capital of the world. It was 30 years before the public would hear of the Internet, so to be given that post was to become invisible to the folks back in New York. It was being sent down to the minors.

Which is why CBS Musical Instruments didn’t even get the best that CBS could send, they got people that the New Yorkers wanted to get rid of. The ones who wound up running the place believed that the only way they could be seen as any kind of successful would be to maximize profits by cutting every possible corner. This despite the fact that Fender products were already efficiently and frugally designed and made. There wasn’t much fat to cut off the bone.

The experiment yielded results that are utterly predictable in hindsight. Within a few years, instruments produced post takeover were seen as very inferior. Not too long ago I worked on an early 70’s Precision Bass for a friend and I was appalled at the low quality. I had heard things were bad, but I had no idea they were THAT bad. I wouldn’t have sold that piece of crap as a factory second. The design was still good, it was still a Fender P-Bass, but the finishing work was just awful. Like saw marks in the wood that were then sprayed over with finish, fasteners the wrong length, etc. It had a maple fretboard and i could tell that they put the neck together, put the frets in and then sprayed the finish on. I guess they buffed the poly off the fret surfaces and called it ready to ship. If you turned it in as a project in high school shop class you might get a C-. $90 basses from Temu look better than this thing did. WAY better.

This story played out in many other corporations, and it still plays out in corporations who aren’t smart enough to have learned from the mistakes of others. For an example of it working out pretty much okay, look no further than the reborn Fender’s acquisition of PreSonus. They kept the PreSonus crew that made the company successful to begin with and the business wasn’t so far removed from their core business that nobody from headquarters wanted to go work there. The synergy was actual, not imaginary.

It’s easy to imagine similar goings-on in the relationship between BandLab and Cakewalk. One of Meng’s “things” for a while, don’t know if it still is, was buying up famous old brands that had either failed completely or fallen on hard times. Harmony Guitars, IIRC? He also has or had Heritage Guitars, What he was doing with Harmony showed promise half a dozen years ago, but never really went anywhere. Remember those BandLab-branded audio interfaces? I guess that was a dead end.

If you’re going to buy up a great old brand, it’s good to have a plan for what you’re going to do with it, As far as I can tell, BandLab’s plans for Cakewalk didn’t go much further than rehiring a handful of staff, then setting that staff to work on polishing Sonar and developing a standalone program that could act as a more integrated desktop version of BandLab DAW. That was about it. No big plans to return the Cakewalk name to greatness.

Cakewalk/Sonar iwouldn’t seem to fit very well into the BandLab scenario. Adobe Audition tells us what we need to know about the prospects of a DAW that’s only available along with a bunch of other programs/services via subscription. When you try to sell it like that, your user base is going to consist of either people who are okay with paying for a bunch of other products and services along with their DAW, or people who will use a DAW just because it came free with a bunch of other products and services they were already buying.

AND both of those groups have to be comfortable with the possibility of losing access to the DAW in the event of personal financial difficulty. As I’ve said before, subscription-only licensing is NOT “where the industry is headed” (assuming that we’re talking about the same industry). Audio software isn’t Netflix or Amazon Prime or AppleTV+ or cable TV or Time magazine or Costco or any number of other things that people have happily bought via subscription for decades. The most popular DAW on the market isn’t sold via subscription, it’s the opposite: buy one license and all subsequent updates are free until either you or the company dies.

The person or persons in charge of Cakewalk-related decisions may wish that they could stick to running the web-based services business without messing about with desktop programs. In this day and age, desktop programs are NOT sexy, I imagine that desktop software is not what’s attracting the ambitious young idiots who want to be on the best path to SUCCESS in the fast-paced world of high tech. It’s probably down there with hardware.

My guess is that the Cakewalk team made their recommendations to the head office based on their decades of experience creating and selling a desktop DAW and were told that the way that headquarters wanted to proceed at first was to make Sonar and Next part of the membership bundle. Then if that didn’t work, they’d explore other options. And I suspect, as Peter does, that it didn’t work in a fairly spectacular way, like how the Tacoma Narrows Bridge didn’t work.

Or maybe it’s part of a plan to launder money through the Cakewalk group.

One thing it ain’t is predictable using ideas and indicators known to us.

Maybe Sonar and Next will be completely gone in 12 months. Maybe the employees in the Cakewalk group will buy the IP at bargain basement prices even lower than BandLab paid and continue to develop them and sell licenses via Plugin Boutique or Gumroad. That’s an idea that could get some,,,um,,,Tracktion.

Maybe there will be revived interest due to the free tier and Sonar will continue to limp along like CbB did, as a cult DAW. Waveform seems to be doing okay in that space. Maybe it is too late for that. Maybe maybe maybe. Cakewalk’s history is full of surprises.

-Erik
___________
superabbit.bandcamp.com

6