LANDR, the AI-powered music platform, has acquired Reason Studios. That pairs Reason with the Montreal-based platform for mastering and distribution, and LANDR subsidiary SynchroArts (makers of VocAlign and Revoice Pro).
LANDR, whose original claim to fame was AI mastering, says that Reason will retain its brand and community. That’s a no-brainer — the Reason brand and product are what they’re buying. It is a funny pairing: LANDR was the first big name in AI music tech, back when it was far less buzzworthy. Reason was the company that once ran an ad telling you to bin your hardware synths. (The idea was that you could do everything in the box — I’ve been to their offices and they do still have hardware.)
I will here evoke my ongoing Rule of Acquisitions — no, not the Ferengi one. It’s the adage that music acquisitions often claim major strategic benefits, but often measuring up more based on their financial significance and the stability of the products.
Here’s the claim, and it’s a big one:
LANDR Acquires Reason Studios to Redefine the Future of Music Creation
Great Scott. (Careful when you do that that you don’t open up multiple dimensions. “We’re not going back!“)
If you’ve been using a DAW long enough, you probably remember a lot of those acquisitions. They’ve come and gone even with single DAWs. Cakewalk, now part of BandLab, was owned for a time by Roland. Steinberg was part of Pinnacle before its current owner, Yamaha. Oddly, one of the most meaningful may have been Ableton buying Cycling ’74 — but that’s an edge case, one where there were a lot of shared values. (And it’s an exception that proves the rule, as Max for Live predates the deal and, for the most part, Cycling ’74 and Ableton continue to operate separately.) Basically, Apple’s acquisition of Emagic (makers of Logic) is apparently a once-in-a-lifetime event. And yes, even the Logic team continues to operate out of the same Hamburg office.
But that was then; let’s decipher what we can about this one.
This was a long time coming. Majority owner Verdane invested in 2017, teeing up just this kind of buyout. That would be a “specialist growth buyout investment firm” — aka a growth equity company, not to be confused with a private equity company. But the point is they were looking for this kind of exit, and got it — and Reason ceased to operate independently from its investors some eight-plus years ago. It seems they did so in a way that might at least give Reason a stable platform for the future — but we’ll see how the stability for current users balances with however aggressive they want to be with growth.
AI is in there somewhere. Perhaps aware that AI is toxic to a growing number of musicians, LANDR’s press release sometimes mentions AI, sometimes dances around it with “intelligence,” and sometimes omits all of it. I expect the short-term upshot of this will be the inclusion of VocAlign and Revoice Pro. VocAlign complements Reason’s recording facility for anyone working with vocal recordings or samples; Revoice Pro adds even more voice correction, tuning, and voice reshaping. LANDR promises that it and Synchro Arts “will gradually introduce new value for Reason users through deeper integrations, enhanced collaboration tools, and creator-focused, AI-powered features.” And that just sounds like LANDR’s current product offering.
It’s probably not about generative AI yet. Every time something like this happens, some Suno fanboys start imagining DAWs you prompt instead of use. The problem with that is, for now, generative AI has a long way to go to even prove it can make money. Mostly, they’re talking about Reason and Reason Rack. LANDR did emphasize generative tools in the survey of musicians they shared in November, and it seems a lot of beginners are using song generators. But they also talked about tools like generating vocal parts and even automating marketing and distribution. (Wait — that last bit sounds potentially dreadful.) Basically, we’ll see.
Doesn’t this dilute Reason+? Here’s a catch-22. Presumably, the appeal of Reason to investors is partly its subscription offering. But LANDR has a subscription of its own — and frankly, the all-you-can-eat plug-in model has had a rocky start among music producers. Reason+ is already vast, so I wonder if the addition of LANDR’s distribution and mastering and samples and some random choice of plug-ins won’t generate some confusion. We’ve definitely seen these things flounder before — looking at you, Native Instruments and Sounds.com.
And yeah, Reason’s loyal users were clear about what they want: user interface improvements, an ownership-based software model, and the kind of software innovation that built the platform. Despite some great engineering efforts behind the scenes (like high-definition display support, Windows on ARM, and other things you might miss), I have heard users complaining about progress since Reason Studios announced its initial acquisition by private investors in 2017. (I don’t want to read too much into the acquisition, apart from the timing of subscriptions which was clearly connected. All DAWs with older, larger codebases do struggle to keep evolving later in their life. Uh, I’m a little creakier than I was in the early 2000s, too.)
Speaking of what users want:
The High Council has spoken. Okay, the other surprise here is a new “Artist Council,” which LANDR and Reason Studios says they’ll establish from well-known producers and longtime Reason users. Maybe this is also a way to head off worries that they’ll turn Reason into some kind of AI music slop-generating machine. For their part, they say the council “will ensure that Reason’s roadmap remains deeply connected to the real-world needs and ambitions of today’s creators, advising on product innovation, creative tools and workflows.”
Um, sure, that sounds good. I’ll make one more Star Trek reference and say this is how it should work. “Hey, I think we should hook up an MCU to Reason and let everyone just make their whole song with text.”
No, that approach is without honor!
Look, honestly, LANDR, as long as you keep Reason up and humming, don’t fire the engineers who have made it great, and keep our Rack Extensions working, with the same product folks guiding new features — this is all a big ask — I’m happy. And I’ll bet I’m not alone. Qapla’!
Oh, and go ahead and change the name back to Propellerhead.
But yeah, given the massive over-investment in AI, are we going to see a lot more of these sorts of acquisitions? Very probably, I’m afraid.
Begun, these AI wars have.
(*sorry, Star Wars and essentially unrecognizable HG2G reference I’ll see myself out now…)