The platformization of music production: How digital audio workstations are turned into platforms of labor market relations

Abstract

Recent decades have seen the proliferation of digital music production technologies, led by digital audio workstations (DAWs) such as Pro Tools and Live. The companies behind them, including Avid and Ableton, resemble music distributors in their ongoing process of platformization—that is, in making themselves the foundation of an increasing range of interactions and transactions. The article discusses economic, social, and cultural aspects of platformization before zooming in on key DAW enterprises and the ways in which they have extended their presence across adjacent markets, including record production, live performance, audiovisual media, instrument manufacturing, sample sales, and music education. These companies have gone beyond selling tools to reorganizing the music industry and rearticulating what is needed to prevail in it, thereby intervening in labor market relations in ways that should not remain hidden “backstage.”

Introduction

Over the last couple of decades, new kinds of players have arrived in the business of the instruments and tools of music production, offering innovative technologies reflective of the digital age. Companies such as Avid, Ableton, and Apple, alongside many others, have made especially substantial investments in digital audio workstations (DAWs), including Pro Tools, Live, and GarageBand, respectively. DAWs are software programs that, in connection with hardware and (increasingly) online resources, enable the recording, programming, and editing of music, as well as the use of various digital instruments and effects. These tools have gained tremendous popularity with studio producers and audio engineers, as well as songwriters, performers, and others engaged in creative audio work. As an indication of the extent of the DAW’s commercial success and prospects for future growth, Avid, the owner of Pro Tools, was recently sold for $1.4 billion to investment company STG (Stassen, 2023).

This article sets out to explore how DAWs have become central to music making and the implications of this technology for the organization of cultural production. A glance at the field shows that DAWs have been attuned to a growing range of user segments while establishing new connections among the markets of recorded music, live music, audiovisual media (film, tv, games), music education, and more. Addressing the producers and consumers in several markets at the same time is a shared trait of several successful companies in recent years, whether in the fields of online trade, social media, entertainment, or journalism. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta have used their networked resources to build platforms that connect various markets and market players. The way in which companies like these evolve has been coined platformization, a term that also encompasses the kinds of effects they are having on the sectors into which they venture (see, for instance, Van Dijck et al., 2018). This trend has been especially striking within music distribution, where players like Spotify have introduced themselves as a new kind of multisided intermediary between artists and listeners—as well as labels, advertisers, and investors—thereby influencing how music is shared, experienced, and valued (see Prey, 2020).

The advance of technology companies within music production should also be examined through the perspective of platformization, and in this article, I therefore ask: How are companies with DAW technology involved in shaping multisided markets, and how might this impact the associated labor relations? I will begin by discussing the notion of platformization and its economic, social, and cultural implications. I will review the research on music distribution and the rise of streaming platforms such as Spotify, then evaluate the extent to which technologies of production are also undergoing platformization. Following an overview of companies and their DAWs, I will dive into their market advances and look at how they form and frame their working relations.

Understanding platforms

The term platform comes from the Greek “platus,” meaning flat, and the Latin “forma,” meaning form, and has the following basic definition: “a raised level surface on which people or things can stand” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2024). Building upon this foundation, the concept of the platform has come to encompass a range of concrete and technical meanings (stage, foundation, infrastructure) as well as more abstract and cultural ones (program, policy, basis for action), as delineated by Gillespie (2010). The platform has grown in its application and appeal in terms of its ability to support people and things and even transform the relationships among them. In turn, the notion has been used by entrepreneurs to highlight what they offer and enable but also by analysts to deconstruct such propositions and identify who or what they do not support.

In the early 2000s, the term was often applied to the ways in which traditional media enterprises were beginning to spread their content and interactions across “media platforms” such as television, the web and mobile media (e.g. Ytreberg, 2009). It has since been associated with the provision of online services that are able to accommodate a growing range of users and uses. Already in 2010, Gillespie suggested that the success of YouTube (owned by Google) depended upon its ability to address various parties at the same time, including “users, clients, advertisers, and policymakers.” By introducing themselves as platforms, these kinds of companies were able to share a “comforting sense of technical neutrality and progressive openness” (Gillespie, 2010: 360) while downplaying their own business strategies and liabilities. Since then, enterprises have launched online platforms in sectors as diverse as journalism, transportation, health, and education, while researchers have sought to keep track of their features and influences. A key shared insight is the ability of the platform to harvest and harness the user data that flows through it, using that data to adjust its offerings as well as what it is charging for them, and how it is doing so (Van Dijck et al., 2018: 9).

Different approaches have been applied to the investigation of the ways in which platforms are introducing themselves into “different economic sectors and spheres of life” (see Poell et al., 2019: 5–6) as well as what they are doing in those sectors and spheres. Nieborg and Poell (2018), for example, have identified three research advances that supplement one another in capturing the economic, social, and cultural implications of platformization. The first resides in the realm of business studies and focuses on the rise of new intermediaries as “matchmakers” between different market players, including various kinds of companies (or “complementors”) as well as the end users (consumers) (Nieborg and Poell, 2018: 4277). Such mediating platforms harness the network effects of providing access to other parties (who gain value from joining the same network), and they substantiate those effects with pricing structures that promote such access (pricing some offers moderately, for example, to enhance profits from other income sources instead, see Evans and Schmalensee, 2016). When they are successful, such platforms can achieve winner-takes-all effects in the sectors into which they venture.

Second, Nieborg and Poell (2018) highlight critical research into the political economy of platformization that scrutinizes how platforms introduce a “centralized, proprietary mode of cultural production” (p. 4279). This angle, they observe, “helps us consider how platformization affects media plurality, the independence of cultural producers, access to media, and the influence of owners,” referring to the work of Hardy (2014), among others. Third, they emphasize research into the “material, computational, and infrastructural dimension of platforms” that is prevalent within software studies. This approach, they insist, offers “detailed explorations of how the sociotechnical features of platforms allow and prompt end-users to afford particular types of activities, connections, and knowledge” (p. 4280), as demonstrated by, for instance, Gillespie (2018).

In the sphere of music, these angles have in different ways been used to capture the rise and resonance of streaming platforms, such as Spotify. Prey (2020) has explored how that company has established new economic relations not only between artists and listers but also between actors in the music market, the advertising market, and the finance market. He finds that the organization of music promotion through playlists is key to the way in which Spotify builds its “platform power,” which in the end is “an always unstable and shifting outcome of the ongoing attempts to coordinate between [these] markets and actors” (Prey, 2020: 8). While looking at how streaming services influence creative labor, Kiberg (2023) found that artists constantly negotiate the opportunities and limitations of adapting their music to Spotify’s playlists and other recommendation systems, including mood-based genres. As Morris (2020) has pointed out, streaming platforms encourage the “optimization” of cultural production in various ways—for example, by tactically adding metadata to tracks to fit with the algorithms that churn out recommendations.

The studies mentioned so far have all been concerned with enterprises that somehow convey content for consumption. Alongside those, however, companies have also developed new means of production, enabling them to impact sectors and creative practices in other, perhaps more substantial, ways. New production technologies have arrived more gradually and less conspicuously than new distribution platforms (remaining “backstage,” so to speak), but they are now being subjected to similar kinds of scrutiny. Recent research has examined the emergence of online services that cater to specific aspects of music production by offering automated mastering (Landr; see Sterne and Razlogova, 2021) or royalty-free samples (Splice; see Arrieta, 2021). The digital audio workstations (DAWs) of the present study, however, have more in common with what Foxman describes as “platform tools,” which he, in his own study of the video game engine Unity, finds to be “integral to the entire production process” and able to “act as an intermediary between industries and platforms” (Foxman, 2019: 2–3). Indeed, DAWs have become key intermediaries for smaller pieces of specialized music technology, including sample packs and mastering tools (known as “plug-ins”; see further below). There are considerable differences between sectors, however, as Nieborg and Poell (2018: 4286) point out—the game industry, for example, is accustomed to the dominance of a limited number of game console manufacturers. Gaming also diverges from the music sector in terms of its organization of professional production, its genre formations, and the scope of its creative activity, suggesting substantial differences in the roles of platforms across sectors. We can therefore assume that DAWs accommodate and impact musical users and uses in distinctive ways.

We know relatively little about how DAWs evolved as platforms, however, as well as how the data that flows through them is managed and used to both adjust their offerings and inform the value creation into which the technology is integrated. The present article’s attempt to explore the platformization of music production will therefore draw heavily upon the aforementioned threefold approach of Nieborg and Poell (2018), focusing, respectively, on operations in multisided markets, the shaping of labor dependencies, and the technology-mediated influences on creative practice. The article will thereby bring the field of music production into the purview of media studies while introducing a media studies perspective to research on music production. Existing research on DAWs has already revealed their centrality to the ways in which musicians explore creative opportunities (e.g. Bell, 2018) and has already engaged in the ways in which creative affordances are designed into the technology (e.g. D’Errico, 2022). Research has yet, however, to capture everything the technology extends into and how it connects various parties as a platform, the power and significance of which reside precisely in the management of relations among those parties.

This article’s exploration of production platforms is motivated by the fact that “many platforms have grown surprisingly influential before a real debate about public values and common goods could get started”—a debate usually involving issues such as “fairness, equality, solidarity, accountability, transparency and democratic control,” according to Van Dijck et al. (2018: 3). This claim holds for the ascendance of the contemporary production platforms upon which musicians increasingly rely to work and prosper, raising the issue of how we can study them as well as engage in their further development.

Approaching DAW platforms

First, what are digital audio workstations and what characterizes their market presence today? From a bird’s-eye perspective, DAWs came about through an interaction of the fields of music and computing referred to as “transectorial innovation” by Théberge (1997: 58). The first DAWs, including Cubase and Pro Tools, merged the qualities of established recording technology with the design conventions of the emerging personal computer of the 1980s, including its visuality and “intuitiveness” (e.g. Strachan, 2017). Later, this interaction led to DAWs such as Live and FL Studio that could offer enhanced computational processing and real-time rearrangement of musical data, as well as integration with networked technology and culture (Reuter, 2022). Early and later DAW generations continue to evolve and compete alongside one another, and trade-media surveys indicate that while the market is dominated by a handful of DAWs, including Pro Tools, Cubase, Logic Pro, Live, and FL Studio, it also encompasses a host of challengers (Sethi, 2018).

Markets are commonly defined by the “action of buying and selling,” but as Karppinen and Moe (2014: 329) point out, it can be hard to unravel this dynamic: “who are the sellers and buyers in a given market, what are the products and services being traded, and what exactly are the rules and norms that govern the exchange?” These questions are equally useful for tracing the transformations involved in DAWs, and I will begin my response by charting the companies, products and consumer relationships (or payment models) on the market today in the context of when the individual DAWs were initially launched (see the table below).

This list includes 28 companies and 34 DAWs, most of them originating in the United States and western Europe but all of them competing in the global market. Several of these companies offer much more than a DAW, and some have arrived from elsewhere in the industry—Apple and Spotify, for example, acquired and adapted their DAWs from others, begging the question of exactly what they hoped to gain from them. Like the technology itself, the sales model of DAWs is constantly changing, starting with a general shift away from one-off sales and toward subscriptions or hybrid models such as purchases that later require paid upgrades. Most of these products are split into tiered versions, and all are available for free trial periods that are tailored to funnel consumers in and then diversify the company’s relations with them. A continual adjustment and balancing of pricing for different user groups is an important aspect of contemporary platforms’ economic operations, as noted above (see Evans and Schmalensee, 2016).

Regardless of payment model, almost all the DAW providers seek to establish a continuous online connection with their registered users through which updates are sent out and user data is brought in. The privacy policy settings typically describe the latter as the “collection of usage and diagnostics data, to improve our products and services,” enabling them to harness various kinds of data from the production activities mediated through the DAW. Overall, DAWs have come to resemble what Nieborg and Poell (2018) call “contingent cultural commodities” that are “increasingly modular in design and continuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback” (p. 4275). For production platforms such as DAWs, other kinds of user contact and interactions can also be involved in the shaping of the offering.

The players in Table 1 have clearly arisen within technological surroundings that have affected what they offer and how. Early companies like Steinberg and Avid engaged in the development of hardware in tandem with the software tailored for it. A second wave of players, including Ableton and Magix, focused more on innovations in their software, which was runnable across different kinds of hardware, and often offered supplementary software (plug-ins) to go with it. While all DAWs have by now been adapted to the Internet, a third wave of players explicitly aligned itself with it. For free or almost free, BandLab, Soundation, and others now invite you to produce music directly in your web browser, then offer you various paid services related to promotion, distribution, and sale, for example.

Table 1.

Companies, products, and payment models of the DAW market.

Company	DAW (year of initial release)	Payment model
Steinberg	Cubase (1989), Nuendo (2000)	Subscription, three tiers
MOTU	Digital Performer (1990)	Purchase
Avid	Pro Tools (1991)	Subscription, three tiers
Magix Software	Samplitude (1992), Music Maker (1994), Acid Pro (1998), Sound Forge (2017)	Purchase, three tiers
Sennheiser	Pyramix (1995)	Purchase
Image-Line	FL Studio (1998)	Purchase
Reason Studios	Reason (2000)	Purchase, four tiers
Muse	Audacity (2000)	Free
Ableton	Live (2001)	Purchase, three tiers
Apple	Logic Pro (2002), GarageBand (2004)	One purchase, one free
Tracktion	Waveform (2002)	Free and subscription, two tiers
Renoise	Renoise (2002)	Purchase
Adobe	Adobe Audition (2003)	Subscription
Acoustica	Mixcraft (2004)	Purchase, two tiers
Zynewave	Podium (2004)	Free and purchase, two tiers
Cockos	Reaper (2006)	Purchase
Mutools	Mutools (2007)	Purchase and donation, three tiers
Audiotool	Audiotool (2008)	Free
Harrison Audio	Harrison Mixbus (2009)	Purchase, two tiers
Presonus	Studio One (2009)	Subscription, three tiers
Ohm Studio	Ohm Studio (2013)	Free and purchase, two tiers
Bitwig	Bitwig (2014)	Purchase, three tiers
BandLab	BandLab (2015), Cakewalk (2018)	Free with advertisements
PowerFX	Soundation (2015)	Subscription, three tiers
Spotify	Soundtrap (2017)	Subscription, four tiers
Amptrack	Amped Studio (2017)	Free and subscription, two tiers
SoundBridge	SoundBridge (2018)	Free, subscription, and purchase, three tiers
Universal Audio	Luna (2020)	Free and purchase, two tiers

There is an overall trend among these companies to use DAWs to showcase, integrate, and perpetuate the use of their entire portfolio of products and services, though those additional commodities vary considerably. These offerings are foregrounded on their websites, as well as on the user interfaces of the DAWs, and those two vehicles constitute the primary source material for the analysis that follows below (citations of these sources are from autumn 2024). I will therefore now shift from the macro-level approach presented above to meso-level analyses inspired by Nieborg and Poell’s tripartite approach to the economic, social, and cultural aspects of platforms outlined above. Also in response to Nieborg and Poell’s (2018) call for “a more historically informed perspective that accounts for the evolving nature of platforms” (p. 4278), I will trace and identify key developments in the three aforementioned waves of activity in the DAW market, while acknowledging its international character. I will highlight the development of a major player in each of the waves, one originating in the United States, one in Europe, and one in Asia. First, Avid’s Pro Tools is one of the earliest DAWs, and it has managed to defend its position as an industry standard over time. Second, Ableton’s Live challenged conceptions of what a DAW could be at the turn of the century, and it has established its own stronghold within contemporary electronica. And third, BandLab Technologies’ BandLab has been able to recruit millions of online users to its “next generation music creation platform” since its release in 2015.

Platforms for market relations

Looking at the development of DAWs over time, one is struck by how they have gradually been extended across markets ranging from recorded music to live music, audiovisual media (film, tv, games), podcasting, digital instruments, plug-ins, beats, music education, and various kinds of artist services. The markets and the ways in which they are connected vary and distinguishing among them entails asking, as mentioned, “who are the sellers and buyers” and “what are the products and services being traded” (Karppinen and Moe, 2014: 329). The hope is to better understand four means of market extension for DAWs: (1) the selling of resources to people making music for different markets, (2) the selling of resources to other, complementary technology developers, (3) the selling of resources to educators and students, and finally, (4) the selling of distribution and promotion services.

Music for different markets

Pro Tools is an early example of the first kind of market extension. The technology was initially developed by the small US company Digidesign (established in 1984), which toward the end of the 1980s made a digital solution for recording and editing referred to as the “first tapeless studio” (Milner, 2009: 337). With a $6000 price tag, Pro Tools was intended for professional recording studios. At the same time, the US company Avid (established in 1987) was targeting the growing creative sector of video production with a digital editing system that was embraced by the film industry as a replacement for celluloid cutting. In 1995, Avid bought Digidesign and integrated its technology with Avid’s own systems, transforming Pro Tools into a professional resource for both music and the sound in audiovisual productions. To this day, Pro Tools not only promises to “make music creation fast and fluid” but also to enable the user to “record, edit, mix, and deliver sound for film, TV, video games, and more,” all the while guaranteeing the “enhanced interoperability” of different tools and tasks (Avid, 2024b). Exploiting its specific market situation, Avid initiated a strategic sector expansion that enabled the company to sell its technology to producers making content for different markets while allowing those producers to work across those markets.

Around the turn of the century, the German company Ableton (established in 1999) initiated other kinds of expansions, this time within the music industry. It was founded by programmers and musicians active in Berlin’s electronica scene who in 2001 released Live as software to enable looping, mixing, and beat-matching in the titular live context. It then rode the wave of new electronic music styles and the booming market for live concerts and festivals in the 2000s (Rogers, 2013: 113). Its innovative interface also allowed musicians to compose and create electronic recordings in new ways, facilitating ready movement across the markets of live and recorded music and between the stage and the studio. Ableton leveraged its growing market position to spread throughout the various strata of electronic music, from experimental art music to dance music and amateur-based remix culture, while splitting its DAW into versions suited and priced for different segments. Indeed, such sensitivity to emerging user groups and market trends remains prevalent in the most recent wave of online DAWs, some of which have even extended into the fields of podcasting and storytelling (e.g. Soundtrap, which Spotify acquired in 2017).

These and other companies are developing and selling the DAW as a platform that can be expanded while offering access to making and selling music and sound to different markets. Their individual trajectory determines how they do so, including how far they stray from the music sector or how they price their different offerings. BandLab Technologies is among the recent initiatives that have invested heavily in online services that are connected to its DAW in new ways. The company offers all its production technologies for free, then charges a fee for access to its own marketplaces for selling what its users produce and consume, including beats and samples. BandLab’s beats market is called Airbit, and it currently costs $19.99 per month for full access (beats are rhythmic instrumental tracks that can be used as musical building blocks).

Resources for developers

Airbit brings us to the second kind of market activity, which is to sell resources that other developers can use to make and trade tools and utilities for music making. Soundation, for example, was launched in 2015 specifically to make beats and participate in their exchange. Before that, in 2007, Ableton launched Max for Live, an extensive programming environment that allows users to build their own instruments, devices, and sound packs to use, share, and sell. In this way, Ableton turned itself into a platform for the sprawling field of music technology developers.

This field has existed for a long time, stretching back to what Théberge (1997: 79–80) refers to as the “cottage industry” of smaller actors making chips and sounds for synthesizers and drum machines in the 1980s. The companies behind DAWs have since established themselves as central intermediaries in the area of “complementary” technology development. In 1996, Steinberg was the first company to establish a technical format for anyone aiming to make technologies that could be used within (plugged into) Cubase, be it digital instruments, effects, sound packs, or something else. It was called VST (virtual studio technology), and it specifies how plug-ins should be programmed to be “seamlessly integrated” with Steinberg’s “host application” (Steinberg, 2024).

Since then, other large companies have developed their own plug-in format—Avid’s is Avid Audio Extension, while Apple’s is Audio Units—and have instated licensing arrangements that licensees must regularly renew. The centrality of the major players makes it worthwhile for plug-in developers to do so in the interest of reaching out and selling their complementary technologies to the growing segments of music makers using their popular DAWs. In turn, the smaller DAW companies also comply with one or more of the formats of the big players to be part of the circulation of plug-ins. The big players extend into the market of plug-ins in yet another way, by selecting those that fit their profiles best and offering them a marketplace on their websites for trading them (external marketplaces such as Pluginboutique have also emerged for developers).

Music education markets

Many of the companies behind DAWs have also moved into a third sphere of music production markets—namely, music education. Several offer their DAW at reduced prices to institutions, teachers and students while providing ever more comprehensive pedagogical plans for the use of the technology for different purposes. Avid promises students “the skills and competencies needed to excel” while “preparing them for jobs using the industry’s leading tools.” It currently boasts “the leading certification program in music and media arts education in the world” and even offers academic institutions the opportunity to be marketed and promoted as accredited learning partners (Avid, 2024a). By offering such programs, DAW companies aim to connect as many relevant educational institutions as possible to a shared platform upon which to base their teaching.

Ableton has also moved beyond established educational institutions and built a new arena for educators and others. Its “certified training program” enables anyone to start working as a professional instructor or course convenor once they meet the requirements for certification, including “exceptional teaching skills and platform proficiency in Live, Max for Live, and Push” (Ableton, 2024c, see also D’Errico, 2022: 79). The company currently has more than 380 trainers in 52 countries, thus founding its own market in music education that acts to shape the relationship among the parties involved, the (educational) products, and the rules that govern the exchange (all defining features of a market, according to Karppinen and Moe, 2014: 329).

In recent years, companies riding the wave of online DAWs and typically characterized by their user-friendliness and social interactivity have designed DAW versions tailored for education and targeted at any school with a music curriculum. Some, like Soundtrap, are offered as institutional subscriptions; others, like BandLab, are offered for free. For all the DAW companies, however, the pricing in the educational sector appears particularly flexible and variable—part, that is, of a continual rebalancing of the long-term goal of getting new generations of music makers to use one’s technology and persuading them that it offers valuable access to the markets—and the short-term goal of earning income from the technology straightaway.

Connections to consumer markets

Finally, companies increasingly frame their production tools as access points to the consumer markets. In doing so, many are able to exploit opportunities that already exist in the organization—for example, Apple offers the ability to release one’s music made in its DAW via the streaming service Apple Music, which among other things highlights tracks that feature spatial audio (Dolby Atmos)—a technology that is integrated into Apple’s Logic Pro as well as its iPhones and ear buds. Spotify’s Soundtrap accommodates the growing field of podcasting by enabling its subscribers to “publish your podcast and transcript directly to Spotify without any hassle” while “boosting the discoverability of your podcast” (Soundtrap, 2024). BandLab, alternatively, designed its online DAW as a social medium through which users can coproduce and share their music with others whose playing of it in turn pushes the music into feeds and trend lists. BandLab DAW users can buy visibility within the platform, which creates its own market of producers and consumers while offering its aspiring artists the opportunity to buy extra promotion and distribution services to reach beyond it.

The companies surveyed in this study demonstrate a great and growing drive toward connecting markets across all the exchanges addressed above (and others). They use the DAW as a node with which to link different market players and offer them the network effects of ready access to one another (composers matched with audiovisual commissioners, for example, or students matched with teachers and prospective employers). In their intermediary role, these DAW companies continuously rebalance the pricing of different offerings and their associated market access, balancing short-term income with longer-term winner-takes-all effects. Exactly how they accomplish this is entwined with their background and resources as well as the ongoing developments in the technological and musical fields into which (or with which) they venture.

DAW dependencies

The analysis will next shift from identifying how DAW companies connect markets to identifying how they impact labor conditions and dependencies. First and foremost, they both form and frame their DAWs as gateways to labor opportunities in a range of markets, instilling people’s dependency upon their use. Large companies have marketing departments that harvest insights from user groups in different sectors that are used to align the DAW with those users’ needs. To accommodate the requirements of audiovisual productions, for example, Pro Tools integrated Dolby Atmos into its systems early on and began sharing guidelines on how to use it. DAWs not only offer access to markets, then, but also supply techniques and expectations regarding how to thrive within them. Several DAW companies have established online forums as well as physical meeting spaces through which to connect and convey information between producers and commissioners, as well as other stakeholders in their field. Ableton even started its own annual creative industry festival, Loop, in 2015, “bringing together artists, technologists, educators and creative thinkers from around the world” to contribute to its “living archive of ideas and techniques” and in this way promising a steady flow of information on the state of the art (Ableton, 2024b).

Companies have also shaped asymmetrical relations to the field of “complementary” music technology developers by defining technical requirements for anyone wanting to plug new products into their DAWs. Not only must new plug-ins comply with the current licensing terms of different DAWs but existing plug-ins must also be continuously updated and aligned with them to function. Recently, this kind of influence has been challenged by two relatively small actors in the market of plug-ins and DAWs, U-He and Bitwig, which have developed an open-access format, CLAP, that invites “participation from the entire audio software industry” and “caters to novel DAW concepts, and opens up new horizons for what a plug-in can do or be” (U-He and Bitwig, 2022). To date, however, the major DAWs have not accepted this format, so plug-in developers must still comply with them to reach their users. In fact, with Max for Live, Ableton has introduced yet another twist on making developers dependent on their platform, as plug-ins made with Max for Live only work on Live. A softer kind of dependency is promoted by BandLab, which tries in different ways to convert its users into steady buyers and sellers of musical building blocks on its beats market.

These companies’ venture into music education is also striking for the ways in which they try to build lasting relationships among the teachers, students, and music sectors. By offering their renowned brands and teaching plans at low prices, institutions are increasingly relying on these companies to recruit students, shape courses, and determine budgets. Clearly, this business investment in music education is an effective way of establishing these technologies as hallmarks of professional practice, serving what Keith et al. (2022: 327) refer to as “the corporate goals of DAW manufacturers, creating standardisation, brand loyalty, revenue, and prestige.” For the students, this investment offers a shared platform for the development of their competency in music making, the continued relevancy of which then comes to depend in part on the continued use of the platform itself.

The interface and functions of each DAW are designed in specific ways that demand considerable effort to learn and continual use if one wants to fully exploit the possibilities therein. Every DAW also has its own format for saving files (in parallel to the plug-in formats), meaning that projects can only be shared among users of the same DAW (though musicians sometimes work around this by sharing their files in less effective ways). Finally, adding functionality for promotion, distribution, and sales underscores the impression that these platforms are likewise necessary for reaching out to consumers in different markets and, in the end, being acknowledged and paid for one’s creative work.

Platforms of culture

The last part of the analysis will turn to the material dimensions of platforms and the way they “allow and prompt end-users to afford particular types of activities, connections, and knowledge,” in the words of Nieborg and Poell (2018: 4280). As revealed above, there are several markets into which DAW companies may expand, but most of them prioritize certain parts of the field over others via their online (and offline) communication, as well as the design of their tools. We will now zoom in on the most prominent cases within the three abovementioned waves of DAWs.

We begin with Avid, which frames Pro Tools as a path to valuable relations for anyone venturing into the sphere of professional music production: as “the industry’s universal language, you can take your project to any producer or studio around the world” (Avid, 2024b). Furthermore, it enables you to “record, edit, mix, and deliver sound for film, TV, video games, and more with the proven audio production tools professionals have long relied on to do their best work,” a claim supported by quotes from several established producers. The appeal of becoming an industry professional is additionally underscored through references to the traditional industry, with the motto “legendary music starts here” and via the user interface itself—for example, it uses linear tracks as an organizing principle that are reminiscent of the magnetic tape systems (and standard Western music notation) with which the music industry started. This idealized legacy is also evoked through Avid’s assortment of plug-ins, many of which are simulated software versions of legendary analogue studio gear (for an analysis of this software’s skeuomorphic design, see D’Errico, 2022: 51). Associations with tradition elevate music production’s craftsmanship into a “collective, and continued practice” (Sennett, 2008: 66), and Pro Tools leverages them to promote itself as a platform for professional market relations and educational applications. Other early DAWs also push craftsmanship—for example, Steinberg positions Cubase as a resource for the creative and compositional aspects of traditional music making.

Ableton, as mentioned earlier, encourages its users to circulate within and across the markets of live concerts, recordings, instruments, education, and beyond by aligning them all with contemporary electronic music culture in its various evolving guises. Its website features a steady stream of news from the frontier of electronic music, such as the story titled “AI and music-making,” which examined “profound questions of creativity, originality and what it means to be a musician” (Ableton, 2024a). This inherent experimentalism is reflected in the user interface of Live, a vertical grid onto which samples, effects, and other musical building blocks can be dragged, dropped, modified, looped, and mixed in live contexts as well as studio sessions (see D’Errico, 2022: 70). This DAW, that is, presents itself as a laboratory of invention where one can make one’s own instruments and develop a whole new style of musical expression. While Avid stakes a claim to the craftsmanship inherent in knowing how to do the job, Ableton appeals to the sensibility of artists for whom originality is a defining trait (Sennett, 2008: 66). Other DAWs such as Reaper and Bitwig have moved into adjacent fields involving innovative programming and coding, while FL Studio has targeted specific electronic genres, including dance music.

Alongside several more entrants into the latest wave of online DAWs, BandLab tries to accommodate the broadest possible field of musical activity, presenting itself as “the next generation music creation platform used by millions around the world to make and share their music” (BandLab, 2024). Its key innovation is to organize itself as a social medium where everyone can share their music with one another while commenting and interacting in different ways. Users can invite others to produce music with them in real time via a very user-friendly interface designed for cooperation and limited to a more prescribed workflow than other DAWs. When users begin a new project, they can even use an integrated AI tool called Songstarter that takes a few simple prompts and cues and generates beats, melodies, and chords in a variety of genres. As discussed, BandLab then pushes users to its beats market (Airbit) and offers to sell them an extra “profile boost” and “fan reach” on BandLab, as well as distribution and promotion on “major music platforms.” Under the motto “music creation for all,” the company has shaped its own upgraded version of do-it-yourself music making—one that is dependent on the networking opportunities of social media and streaming services that the platform provides. The CEO of BandLab Technologies insists upon the company’s egalitarian ethos: “We don’t believe that people’s creativity or their ability to make music or to express themselves should be limited by their spending power or their knowledge of how to write a song” (Ingham, 2023). All of BandLab’s production tools are currently available for free (the fees come later, for access to markets where earnings might be generated). In this way, the company has inserted itself into the global population of music makers and listeners—it currently boasts 100 million users—and has capitalized upon their aspirations for commercial success.

While BandLab is the most prominent online DAW, several other DAWs are also using the Internet to amass users and generate internal markets through which to test new offerings, including AI tools (Amped Studio, for example), that might prove profitable in the future. Avid, Ableton, and BandLab organize and articulate their technological resources in distinctive ways to accommodate targeted parts of the music sector (industry professionals, original artists, and more vernacular creative activity, respectively). A notable exception is the largest company, Apple, which does not extend into specific music cultures with Logic Pro and GarageBand—these DAWs are rather extensions of the company’s well-established portfolio of hardware, software, interfaces, and modes of market presence. While these examples highlight differences between companies’ resources and trajectories, they also reveal a shared drive toward orchestrating assets in ways that shape access to markets and the associated opportunities to evolve.

Discussion and conclusion

This article was triggered by my interest in how tools of music production have shifted from being relatively discrete artifacts to being entwined in constellations that continuously rework and make them “contingent,” in the words of Nieborg and Poell (2018: 4276). The term captures how products and services are increasingly conditioned by datafied user feedback and how users are, in new ways, bound to the platforms (and companies) that provide them. Building on these scholars’ threefold approach to platformization, I have explored this shift in economic, social, and cultural terms. To capture how companies with DAW technology are involved in shaping multisided market relations, I first distinguished among the different kinds of markets and actions, actors and commodities involved in their “buying and selling,” as is recommended by Karppinen and Moe (2014: 329). The key commodities in play revealed themselves to be (1) resources for making music to different markets, (2) resources for complementary technology developers, (3) resources for music education, and (4) resources for reaching consumers. In their orchestration of the exchange of these commodities, DAW platforms instill social dependencies that work individually as well as in tandem with one another. For example, users buying into the educational resources of a given DAW are also pointed to its related market opportunities. By establishing their platforms as readily available everyday interfaces for all the functions involved in music making, these companies are able to gradually consolidate and entrench their mediation of the relevant labor market relations. As a result, what is “just” a DAW evolves into a central node in the networks of different fields of practice, which the major players of this study seem to achieve to a considerable degree.

The drive to achieve a winner-takes-all position is even more pronounced for the platforms of music distribution such as Spotify. Such services exploit different conditions for coordinating the interplay among parties because they essentially channel the flow of music files for listening. The provision of these files is less complex and diverse in nature than the production offerings promised by DAWs, allowing for network effects that are probably more easily established but perhaps less durable. A related difference is the kinds of data flowing through the platforms, which in the case of distribution platforms are consumption data, allowing them to oversee and steer its flow as well as to share valuable data with key parties. With this information, they become hubs for artists and fans, as well as labels, publishers, advertisers, and other backers, and they are able to leverage “platform power” (Prey, 2020: 8) to influence relations among these groups.

This insight triggers the intriguing question of what kinds of data that flow through production platforms, and how “usage and diagnostics data” is captured and “used to improve products and services,” as the user settings typically states. These data can in principle be any kind of traces left by the producer and her productive choices in the encounter with the technology, all of which can be called production data. Companies can harvest large quantities of data on how their tools are used in different fields, while also gathering more qualitative user insights through prototype testing, service support, and interactions with educators and other user groups. These are data on how music is produced for different markets, by producers specializing in different practices, enabling adjustments in the technology and its value for different stakeholders. In its intermediary position, the DAW can also capture user data concerning plug-ins and control the extent to which this data flows between plug-in users and plug-in developers. Furthermore, DAW companies orchestrate the flow of information regarding how their technology should be used through moderated online user forums as well as their tutorials and other educational materials. So, within as well as around it, DAWs can capture, utilize, and convey production data in ways that support their role as platforms of production.

As revealed above, several production platforms are extending into distribution operations, while established distribution platforms, such as Spotify, move into production. This pincer maneuver on music industries and cultures enables them to harness data from both sides of the value chain of music, offering new insights into as well as new means of overseeing its supply and demand. This further shift represents a recent stage in the platformization of music that merits more research, not least in terms of how music makers respond to the opportunities and restrictions that such platforms introduce.

A related case in point is how companies are using new types of AI-based services, some of which fulfill specialized functions in music production, such as mixing and mastering, while others simply enable anyone to generate the kind of music they want to listen to. Some companies are testing internal “credit” currencies to access these services, beginning to transform discrete actions in music making into commodified moments. Established value chains are thereby being further challenged, with implications for the “worth of persons, goods, and services” in market terms (Karppinen and Moe, 2014: 333). Researchers have already interrogated the way in which companies are using previously released recordings to train their AI tools despite attendant issues of both ownership and revenues (e.g. Drott, 2021). Another turn in this debate is the extent to which DAW companies can use production data to develop AI solutions, data that essentially constitutes people’s creative work. AI tools are already being integrated into DAWs as well as introduced through plug-ins. BandLab recently hired experts for its “AI music team” and then partnered with Universal Music Group to form an “expansive, industry-first strategic relationship concentrated on artificial intelligence” (Universal Music, 2023). While these partners declare a “shared commitment to ethical use of AI and the protection of artist and songwriter rights,” research should likewise inform the debate over how evolving platforms might challenge public values, as called for by Van Dijck et al. (2018: 3), not least in terms of their transparency and accountability in the use (or abuse) of data.

Taking a bird’s perspective on the development of DAWs makes their debatable aspects come into view, including how they gradually make themselves the basis for different fields of musical practice, including industrial, artistic, and more vernacular ones. While DAWs clearly offer music makers a range of new opportunities at relatively affordable prices, they also delimit the horizon of alternatives and the associated commercial structures. My analysis has shown that these companies are pointedly expanding their operations horizontally, across different parts of the music sector, as well as vertically, across value chains of production and distribution—expansions that have been associated with market power and its potential abuse (Havens and Lotz, 2012: 22).

A notable aspect of this expansion is the intervention into education and the provision of platforms and learning resources upon which learning institutions seem to increasingly depend. This shift underscores the need for research not only to be critically aware but also to contribute to the development of technological alternatives in service to the purposes of academics, teachers, and students. And we should recognize the value of the broad technological development taking place outside of large corporations, where collaborative open-source solutions (non-proprietary) are based more directly on the interests of developers and music makers themselves, such as the CLAP format, which according to its programmers “caters to novel DAW concepts, and opens up new horizons for what a plug-in can do or be” (U-He and Bitwig, 2022).

While we need more insight into “who let the DAWs out,” as Reuter (2022) puts it, we also need more insight into who let them in to the practices and processes of music production. Such empirical research will shed further light upon how market relations, labor conditions, and creative practices are being transformed. As Nieborg and Poell (2018: 4289) point out, platformization is a gradual process whose outcomes emerge from the “intricate interplay” between platforms and users. Their threefold approach has proven critical to unpacking the economic, social, and cultural dimensions of the platformization of music production, and it can inform inquiry into other cultural sectors as well, from computer games to design and journalism, cross-fertilizing and propelling further research into platformizing production technology and its implications for cultural production.