The Evolution Begins: Why LinkedMusicians 2.0 is the Future + THE LATEST UPDATES

[LinkedMusicians]

With the giveaway now complete, I just made a blog post about what’s ahead for LinkedMusicians and while I realize that change isn’t always easy, this is an exciting and very positive and significant change for our community that will ensure, not only that we will continue, but that we will thrive.

In the year since LinkedMusicians opened to the pubic, we hit a massive milestone of 20,000+ monthly unique visitors, and to keep this momentum going, it’s time to level up. The “Next Milestone” isn’t just about moving the conversation; it’s about giving this community a faster, more dynamic space to thrive.

Why You Should Be Excited:

• We’ll Be On One of the Most Successful Social Media Platforms Available Today – While LinkedMusicians is a social media platform far more advanced than the major forums in this space, Reddit has even more advanced capabilities and is one of the leading social media platforms in existence. The LinkedMusicians community will be more easily discoverable than ever before. Joining will only take a single click on one of the most popular websites on the web.
• Real-Time Collaboration and Superior Tools The new LinkedMusicians subreddit allows for instant deal-sharing, faster troubleshooting, and a more streamlined way to connect with fellow creators. It’s a giant leap behind legacy forum platforms, but has a very familiar feel to it.
• A Powerhouse Leadership Team: While I focus on the long-term marketing strategy and project oversight, I’m thrilled to have Katchi, BluesCat, and JoeGYork leading the charge on the ground to keep our space professional and productive.
• Focus on the High-Utility Tools: Moving the daily chatter to Reddit allows the main site to double down as the industry’s premier Resource Hub—keeping the focus on the tools, samplers, and transparency data you rely on.

What’s Not Changing:

• Our Core Values: The LinkedMusicians Charter and our commitment to a non-toxic environment remain the bedrock of everything we do.
• Verified Transparency: We will continue to be the “Laboratory” for honest industry discussion and deceptive-marketing-free zones.

This is about scale. We’ve built a foundation together, and now it’s time to see how far we can take it. Head over to the new subreddit, subscribe, and let’s get to work on the next 20,000 members!

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22

[LinkedMusicians]

I also want to note that the LinkedMusicians platform is no longer open for new registrations as of today.

All registered members will have full use of the platform, including messaging, but there will be no new memberships. Those who want to become part of the LinkedMusicians community will need to register with our subreddit: r/LinkedMusicians

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedMusicians/

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3

[LinkedMusicians]

If you’re new to Reddit, this video will help you quickly get up to speed. Note that while, like every major social media site, parts of Reddit are as toxic as other sites. But the LinkedMusicians subreddit will have the same values that we have here at the site and will not have the toxicity some subreddits have. Consider that  r/LinkedMusicians is our little piece of the subreddit universe that maintains the same values that we have everywhere else, but once you step outside of our subreddit, it’s the wild west and parts of Reddit can be incredibly toxic, just like the big social media sites or highly toxic forums in this space like VI-Control. Our subreddit will always maintain our values.

 

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4

[LinkedMusicians]

Yesterday I took the same post I made in our subreddit and reposted it to r/nativeinstruments. While the original post in our subreddit only had a single comment and one up vote in two days, within a half hour, the repost in NI’s subreddit had 11 comments. Before anyone sees that and thinks to themselves — “wow, that’s depressing” — consider this. That lack of reaction to the original post is very similar to what would happen if I posted that thread on LinkedMusicians — actually, I did post it here, and the response was non-existent. And if you delved into the site stats, you would see that A LOT of people viewed that thread here — but none of them commented. That is the reality of our situation, lots of visitors and extremely low interaction.

So why is it better to have that problem on our subreddit than this site? Because Reddit is one of the ten most popular sites on the web. Reddit users can search and join other communities of interest in a single click. Even more, our presence there means that I can repost r/LinkedMusicians post in other relevant communities where those posts will be of value and grow our community in a way that is not possible with a standalone social media platform like LinkedMusicians.com. Our subreddit gives us an incredible opportunity to reach and grow our community that is perfect for LinkedMusicians. Over the past year, far more than 100,000 web users have come to use LinkedMusicians as a great resource for deals on DAWs, plugins, and sample libraries, for finding lists of excellent, curated and recommended tools, for researching the tools they use to make music, and to learn more about the deceptive practices in the industry, all in an environment that aggressively works to ensure that toxicity isn’t a part of this community. Even more, we do it in a place that advocates for music producers. That’s not just rare in this industry, it’s non-existent. Part of the reason is that it’s not profitable.

So my job is to take this attention and grow our registered membership and the social interactions of the LinkedMusicians membership. My passion project was never to create a deal site. That doesn’t drive me to invest my time and money in this admittedly idealistic project. My objective was to create an environment without the deceptive and manipulative marketing practices that are pervasive in the major and non-major forums, subreddits, and Facebook Groups in this industry and to create an environment where toxicity — which is extremely profitable for these communities — is not accepted.  The reason toxicity is profitable is that controversy interests people. That drives up activity and things like time spent on sites, increases page views, leads to more clicks, etc — all of which is how these businesses make money.

What doesn’t drive revenue? Creating a non-toxic environment where unethical, illegal, and regulation-violating business practices are specifically forbidden. Encouraging community members to share negative experiences as well as positive ones with the companies they buy from, including our affiliate partners. That’s unheard of, and, from a revenue standpoint, it’s an outrageously bad idea that no for-profit business is going to do. But that’s exactly what LinkedMusicians allows. Not off-the-rails, crazy hate rants against developers  — that’s of no value when you’re researching products and brands, and that kind of incivility creates a toxic environment. Honest, civil, and open conversations about experiences is what it’s about. And this separates the mission of LinkedMusicians from every other existing online community, and it’s starting to be noticed by Google and Gemini, and the various LLMs as well as among Redditors.

So right now, as we transition from this Forum and OPEN MIC, I recommend that everyone register over at the subreddit. While @fretman has stepped up to be our Deal Master, I’m going to focus on making this transition easy for everyone. Consider me our community’s guide for this evolution of our community. I’ve posted helpful posts here on our subreddit that explain the differences between legacy forums like ours, KVR, GearSpace, and VI-Control to make the transition is easier — and to show why Reddit is one of the ten most popular websites.

If you have any questions, please post them! I realize that change isn’t always embraced. But this change is not only going to preserve the mission of LinkedMusicians, I believe it’s going to take us to a completely different level, and in time, to a level of interaction that we’ve never seen before. I’ll post updates in this thread.

– Peter

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3

[swijaya]

On LinkedMusicians said

Yesterday I took the same post I made in our subreddit and reposted it to r/nativeinstruments. While the original post in our subreddit only had a single comment and one up vote in two days, within a half hour, the repost in NI’s subreddit had 11 comments. Before anyone sees that and thinks to themselves — “wow, that’s depressing” — consider this. That lack of reaction to the original post is very similar to what would happen if I posted that thread on LinkedMusicians — actually, I did post it here, and the response was non-existent. And if you delved into the site stats, you would see that A LOT of people viewed that thread here — but none of them commented. That is the reality of our situation, lots of visitors and extremely low interaction.

So why is it better to have that problem on our subreddit than this site? Because Reddit is one of the ten most popular sites on the web. Reddit users can search and join other communities of interest in a single click. Even more, our presence there means that I can repost r/LinkedMusicians post in other relevant communities where those posts will be of value and grow our community in a way that is not possible with a standalone social media platform like LinkedMusicians.com. Our subreddit gives us an incredible opportunity to reach and grow our community that is perfect for LinkedMusicians.

This gave me a new understanding on why you move, and with it, I can now give my 100% consent (not that you need it anyway).

I genuinely am not chatty (you won’t see me chat away on other places either), but I like to read what others (who most of the time are more experienced/informed) say about a particular deal/topic that interests me. And I can see that, many times, it’s not happening here. Especially for deals: it’s important for me to be able to read what others say about it, whether it’s a good enough deal, what practical uses it has, etc. And sometimes, not always but sometimes, the same deal posting elsewhere has people discussing it, which is more informative for me personally. Well, maybe those chatty (but knowledgeable) ones aren’t here yet.

 

So hopefully it would be more lively in the new place.

 

On LinkedMusicians said

The reason toxicity is profitable is that controversy interests people. That drives up activity and things like time spent on sites, increases page views, leads to more clicks, etc — all of which is how these businesses make money.

I concur!

 

2

[LinkedMusicians]

I realize that it’s A LOT to ask people to make the move to the subreddit and that we certainly won’t see everyone come along with us. That’s understood, and I have zero hard feelings against anyone who isn’t making the journey with us. This is a passion project. It’s about the love of creating music and my love for sharing that joy with others and encouraging others in that endeavor. But I know this as a strategist. This community will grow at a rate it never could, and come alive like it never could, if we remained a standalone social media platform like we are today.

If I created this to be a deals site, seeing the site hit 1,100 active visitors per day for only being public for one year would be a great milestone. But that was never my objective. User interaction in the community is the criterion that matters, and that simply isn’t here — and I know how to improve that and make our community come alive. My instincts — and partially based on what I’m seeing — is that we’ll see 25% to 35% of our community members make the move to the subreddit. We’re already almost there. IMO, it’s a win and that’s a great. The fact that we had a community member, @fretman step up and take over posting deals so that I can now focus on growing our community and leading the move is fantastic (and we can use more community members posting deals too; I am offering to set anyone up who asks with a deals dashboard with hundreds of deals everyday where they just use their judgement to curate — to pick the deals they think are the best for our community).

It’s how we grow. And if we get to 10,000 users in our subreddit and we’re active, I will reevaluate reopening the forums and social media groups on this site or simply having a one login access to LinkedMusicians site and our subreddit community. As you might have noticed, I’m already working on a feature I had originally planned for LinkedMusicians, music-related theory, trivia, and word games that the community can play together.  When I had to take over deal posting, I was unable to keep working on the functionality I planned to add to the site and lacked the time to do the things it takes to grow the community — beyond growing site traffic, which is much easier than growing the community aspect of the site.

I’d also ask, consider this. While all of the LLMs (AI tools) are knowledgeable on websites, none of them can compare to Gemini, because it has Google’s resources, like their unparalleled index of websites and Knowledge Graph.  I suggest this to you and everyone else reading this, visit Gemini and ask these questions in three separate prompts:

• What is LinkedMusicians?
• Is it any different than the long-established forums like KVR, VI-Control, and GearSpace?
• Do you think LinkedMusicians has been effective at creating an environment that is free of or less prone to the ethically problematic marketing practices from the big traditional forums?

That’s Google’s AI’s analysis of LinkedMusicians, comparing it to alternatives. I guarantee that everyone will learn something about this community that they didn’t know before and no, that is simply an AI chatbot regurgitating copy on this website. It is a comparative analysis and Gemini is great at doing that with websites — better than any other LLM, in my experience.

https://gemini.google.com/

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1

[LinkedMusicians]

I’ve decided to extend the timeline that the LinkedMusicians forums will remain open until Friday, June 5, 2026.

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by LinkedMusicians. Reason: Modified the closing date to June 5, 2026

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1

[LinkedMusicians]

As the activity of the site has dramatically declined since my announcement, we are moving up the closure of the forums and Open Mic and migration to the r/LinkedMusicians ( https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedMusicians/ ) to Friday, June 5, 2026.

The forums, Open Mic, and other social groups on LinkedMusicians.com will be deleted, all of the resources will remain.

If you wish to save any threads, posts, or comments, please do so soon, as we will begin deleting content as of June 15, 2026.

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by LinkedMusicians.

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