I’ve started learning to make electronic music. It’s kind of a crazy thing for me to take on because I don’t have a background in music. I was the one playing outside while you were taking piano lessons; it was fun at the time, but now I’m trying to learn music theory from scratch.
But I’m not going to whine about my lack of music fluency; I’m just pointing out something I’ve noticed about music software. I won't bore you with the details, but I'll just tell you that to be a bedroom producer, you'll need a piece of software called a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW.)
There's something weird about the DAW market. See, they can get pretty expensive, so the makers of DAWs usually let you try them for a limited time, or have a lesser, free version. So far, these are the ones I've tried out:
- Garage Band
- Cakewalk
- Tracktion Waveform
- Cubase
- Studio One
- FL Studio
- Ableton Live
- Reaper
- LMMS
- Bitwig
- Mixcraft
- Acid Pro
- QTractor
And there are many more I haven't tried. A few of the more famous ones:
- Logic
- Pro Tools
- Ardour
- Reason
- Maschine
What I'm getting at is that there are a lot of options. And out of all those, only LMMS and QTractor are not-for-profit open source projects. The rest are by people trying to make money.
This isn't modern capitalism! There should be only two options: the crappy one and the expensive one. Or maybe two nearly identical competitors, but people get really worked up arguing which is better. A bunch of these should have merged together. Some of them bought by big companies who lost interest and discontinued them. Statistically, if you have this large a group of tech companies, at least one would have been bought by Yahoo and mismanaged out of business. And either Google or Microsoft should have started their own competitor and run another half-dozen out of the industry. And what about changing focus? Every time there's a new buzzword in tech, one or two should have announced a pivot to the new paradigm, and now they're in cloud computing, cryptocurrencies, or A.I.
But no, somehow this is the one industry where there are dozens of options: synergies and economies of scale be damned. I'm not sure why. One explanation is that it's a labor of love. Music is a business that's very personal, and everyone wants to do it their way.
Also, the market is at just the right size: there's a fair-sized market available when you consider both the pros and hobbyists. It's enough to keep each of the competitors going, but not enough to attract big companies that will wipe out the competition (save for Apple, which makes Garage Band and Logic, but being exclusive to the Mac, they won't push everyone else out of business.)
There's also a lot of nuances to the industry, where applications have grabbed their own little niche: Pro Tools has established itself as the standard for recording studios, while Ableton Live is the choice for Electronic Music. FL Studio has hip hop, and Logic is the choice of Apple worshippers. Reason is the best for people used to working with traditional electronic music equipment, and Reaper is beloved by the folks who think the best application is the one that can do anything, but in a really complicated way, and thus keep recommending Linux to your grandma.
It's also weird that visual art didn't work out this way. That industry is dominated by Adobe. And yet, you'd think that if any software customers would walk to the beat of their own drum, it would be visual artists. They'd be the ones to ignore the advantages of compatibility to get a product with the right intangibles, or one that's made by a little band of idealists. But no, they've given one giant company a near monopoly. The only ones walking to the beat of their own drum are the ones programming it on a drum machine. Okay, that was pretty corny, and I apologize; I wrote that thing about the artists walking to the beat of their own drum without even meaning to make a joke, and then felt like I had to do something with it, and it all went wrong.
So I don't entirely know why, but this is the one industry where things worked out the way I expected the future to look: Dozens of options, something for everyone.
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