DAW popularity stats FB

[syntonica]

For DP, the only real resource is MOTUnation.com. I know a lot of people criticize it, but I've always found then to be knowledgeable and more importantly, helpful. They just don't tolerate the kinds of shenanigans one finds here or on GS.

I'm not sure if there's a way to discover how many people are active members, or at least are signed up.

Motunation

STATISTICS
Total posts 545410 • Total topics 59740 • Total members 41248

Duh. That was easy! 41k is a good number to compare against the other numbers given above.

[ShawnG]

None of these methods are valid, as you are only guessing - and guesses do not contain any information outside stating the personal improvable opinion of somebody - when you say "damn near accurate" that is another guess. It is valid to say that you guess this, however it is not valid to infer anything from it.

For me it is only fun if it is somewhat smart, insightful and relevant or at least highly entertaining for some other reason. And the latter for me is to correct your false assumptions and conclusions here.

sorry, there is a substantial amount of actionable information available in between the two binary conditions of "blind ass guess" and "hard science". The information in this case should not be taken as a total concrete example of anything other than the number of members of each of those social media communities, however it DOES tell you something, which elevates this well beyond the realm of the blind ass guess, as does the reddit data. raw hard science is impossible to obtain in many areas like this, and companies have to make decisions on information like this. for me, it corresponds to how I would have thought it did, but I'm on the generation that uses facebook. the reddit data may be more indicative of a younger age group. you can't just ignore the thing though if you have any interest in the subject.

Now as to why it's relevant to us here? possibly we have invested too much of our own identity in the tools we use?

[sjm]

And due to the lack of this data, the statistics mentioned here in this thread are worth exactly zero - i.e. they carry no valid information whatsoever.

Not at all; they conclusively prove that it's not only the OP with too much time on their hands!

[machinesworking]

None of these methods are valid, as you are only guessing - and guesses do not contain any information outside stating the personal improvable opinion of somebody - when you say "damn near accurate" that is another guess. It is valid to say that you guess this, however it is not valid to infer anything from it.

For me it is only fun if it is somewhat smart, insightful and relevant or at least highly entertaining for some other reason. And the latter for me is to correct your false assumptions and conclusions here.

sorry, there is a substantial amount of actionable information available in between the two binary conditions of "blind ass guess" and "hard science". The information in this case should not be taken as a total concrete example of anything other than the number of members of each of those social media communities, however it DOES tell you something, which elevates this well beyond the realm of the blind ass guess, as does the reddit data. raw hard science is impossible to obtain in many areas like this, and companies have to make decisions on information like this. for me, it corresponds to how I would have thought it did, but I'm on the generation that uses facebook. the reddit data may be more indicative of a younger age group. you can't just ignore the thing though if you have any interest in the subject.

Now as to why it's relevant to us here? possibly we have invested too much of our own identity in the tools we use?

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on it. Relevance is mostly just related to things like why DP or Bitwig or Muzzys etc. don't get controller developers making many devices with dedicated settings for those DAWs. You can flatly see that the popular DAWs get marketed to by third party developers, and the ones I use don't...

It's just interesting as a base for a raw number, of course it's not 100% accurate but what other number can you use? Someone mentioned Motunation for DP numbers, that site it 20+ years old, that's every person that's bought a copy of DP or thought of buying it in the last 20+ years. Then what do you compare it to? Cubase's main forum is run by Steinberg, there's definitely more of a chance that number is higher (295,216) for that reason. In the case of Motunation 41k might be a relevant number in terms of how many current users of DP there are but there's no way of comparing it to other DAWs.

Facebook is ubiquitous enough to say that if you join a group on there you have a current interest in that DAW, you don't mind it cluttering your feed.

[melomood]

We need to get the redditors together with the youtubers & facebookers to really break down the numbers. Now I know this will be messy at first with some cross platforming & social platform rivalry. No doubt there will be a few redditing facebooked youtubers,but we can work around that.

[ShawnG]

Company forums also have the disadvantage of being about ALL of the company's products rather than just the DAW. MOTU most likely has a fair few registered users who just own a MOTU interface, and don't use DP, similar with Steinberg and others. I also have never unregistered from a forum that I have joined, but I do keep my facebook and reddit feeds manageable by unsubscribing/unfollowing things I no longer have an interest in.

[carrieres]

Some years ago I collected some statistics from forum members :
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=172802

[machinesworking]

Some years ago I collected some statistics from forum members :
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=172802

There are a bunch of variables to KVR though that are immediately identifiable: In 2008 this place definitely was more biased against Mac users than now. VST and AU plug in hosting wasn't a thing for Reason for instance, so that's going to affect it's standing on a site that started all about Plug-Ins.

Jens could only come up with Facebook being a social media platform that not everyone likes, which isn't something you could easily tie to a particular DAW, same with age bias, maybe Zoomers are less likely to use it, but the rest are all represented etc. But barring Sonar having been raped by Gibson your numbers also correlate in terms of what was popular then.

[ghettosynth]

Jens could only come up with Facebook being a social media platform that not everyone likes,

I think that jens just generally rejected the naïve attempts at analyzing data that's dominant in this thread. I've yet to see much discussion of important control factors in facebook groups, (group) age being the first that comes to mind. That's just for starters, there's so much variance in content in facebook groups that you really can't infer much of anything without controlling for that in some way. For example, IIRC, the Reason group is dominated by Hip Hop artists showing off their beats.

That bad casual analysis confirms your biases only says something about confirmation bias.

[Hink]

Jens could only come up with Facebook being a social media platform that not everyone likes,

I think that jens just generally rejected the naïve attempts at analyzing data that's dominant in this thread. I've yet to see much discussion of important control factors in facebook groups, (group) age being the first that comes to mind. That's just for starters, there's so much variance in content in facebook groups that you really can't infer much of anything without controlling for that in some way. For example, IIRC, the Reason group is dominated by Hip Hop artists showing off their beats.

That bad casual analysis confirms your biases only says something about confirmation bias.

oh c'mon without bogus bias confirmation KvR would be dead space...who gives a crap about facts or truth here

[chk071]

You know, there's a couple of things which do have an influence on me, considering the popularity of a DAW. With a more popular DAW, I know that it will be actively developed in the future, I know there'll be a lot of answered questions on the internet, a lot of tutorials, documentation will probably be good, and it will also most likely be more stable, because -> more users and "beta testers", the more bugs will be reported and fixed.

What it does not influence though is my preference of workflow, or any esoteric stuff like "Artixt XY uses DAW AB, so I have to do it as well".

And, I also don't think that you'll ever figure out precisely which DAW's are the most popular. Let's even pretend that we have exact sales figures. The hobbyist/bedroom producer market is so big these days that it will give you a picture of what the popular DAW's are, but not how many professionals use it. Or, what the ratio between hobbyists and professionals is.

So, yeah, pretty much no real satisfying result possible here, I'm afraid. I DO think the figures mentioned in the OP give an approximate picture though.

[machinesworking]

Jens could only come up with Facebook being a social media platform that not everyone likes,

I think that jens just generally rejected the naïve attempts at analyzing data that's dominant in this thread. I've yet to see much discussion of important control factors in facebook groups, (group) age being the first that comes to mind. That's just for starters, there's so much variance in content in facebook groups that you really can't infer much of anything without controlling for that in some way. For example, IIRC, the Reason group is dominated by Hip Hop artists showing off their beats.

That bad casual analysis confirms your biases only says something about confirmation bias.

Mostly, there's nothing close to this to be had. I've never once said that the data was near conclusive, just that it's all we have. For whatever reason this translates in KVR terms to I think it's 100% accurate. But really? do you have any illusions that Pro Tools, FL Studio, Live, Logic and Cubase aren't the top 5 DAWs? Or that Studio One, Reason, and Reaper aren't in the 2nd tier? followed by the rest trailing far behind? None of those numbers are surprising to me, even if it's not 100% accurate data, the fundamental breakdown is exactly what anybody whose spent years in the game would expect.

That's all I conclude from it, a generalization that I would have made even without Facebook and Reddit numbers to back it up, and not because of some personal bias. Remember my main DAW for years now has been DP, which barley struggles to make the grade, which I find accurate in terms of interest. Even the webinars they hold are mostly guys like me in their 40's to 70's. Believing this is certainly not helping my biases.

Plus, any other metric would confirm high numbers for Pro Tools, and low numbers for DP. This isn't an isolated case, it's just a casual case that IMO comes as close as can be had to reflecting a marketshare percentage of the user bases for each DAW.

[wuworld]

This is mostly for fun, people shouldn't read too much into it, but I do think it's more accurate than it's not. The largest Facebook groups for all the DAWs I could think of at the moment, and it IMO reflects what I thought might be about right in terms of actual popularity. Most DAWs have multiple groups but most other groups are small or specialized, and one is likely to be part of multiple groups for their main DAW. This is near the only metric I know of that's not really biased at all, even if it's arguably not that accurate.

Pro Tools - 143k members.
FL Studio - 132k
Ableton Live - 101k
Logic Pro - 85k
Cubase - 51k
Studio One 39k
Reason 25k
Reaper 18k
Sonar 7.2k
Bitwig - 5.4k
Digital Performer 3.7k
Traction Waveform 1.1k

Of course my two favorites at the moment DP and Bitwig are near the bottom.

I would love to see a poll as far as the industry in general. Like what todays modern producers/songwriters are using. I think for mixing it's pro tools. For songwriting/production it's either logic, ableton or FL.

[machinesworking]

I would love to see a poll as far as the industry in general. Like what todays modern producers/songwriters are using. I think for mixing it's pro tools. For songwriting/production it's either logic, ableton or FL.

That's probably accurate, simply because most recording and mixing studios here in the USA use Pro Tools, and the younger crowd seems to gravitate towards Live, Logic, FL Studio, and Studio one.

The question you have to ask yourself though is it for any real reason? or for the reasons we eat fast food? IMO you should use what you think is best, not what others use.

I'm not saying any of those DAWs are bad, just them being the most popular is in no way in indicator of their superiority.

[ghettosynth]

Jens could only come up with Facebook being a social media platform that not everyone likes,

I think that jens just generally rejected the naïve attempts at analyzing data that's dominant in this thread. I've yet to see much discussion of important control factors in facebook groups, (group) age being the first that comes to mind. That's just for starters, there's so much variance in content in facebook groups that you really can't infer much of anything without controlling for that in some way. For example, IIRC, the Reason group is dominated by Hip Hop artists showing off their beats.

That bad casual analysis confirms your biases only says something about confirmation bias.

Mostly, there's nothing close to this to be had.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.