How Many Staff Are There At Reason Studios?

[Creativemind]

Hi All!

I'm just wondering if anyone knows how many staff there are at Reason Studios?

I know this might sound like a rant but Reason 8 came out on September 30th 2014 and I can think of 6 features that could've been added there since which would really improve it. That was nearly 5yrs and 5 months ago. Why are they so slow to implement stuff or is it just reluctance?

So are there way more staff at Image-line, Ableton, Presonus etc as they seem to implement / have way more features. I recently saw on here (someone posted) that Reaper only have 2 staff and are Reaper has updates like every month or so it feels like.

Thanks!

[Faastwalker]

5

[aeox]

Think about what features Reason really NEEDS. I've read your requests over the years.I added a lot of your requests to this poll https://forms.gle/4vAXcAR1FtCCG7gK8 let me tell you , your feature requests are not popular with the majority responses

These ones though, MANY people stand behind.

High resolution GPU-accelerated graphics. (mattias said they are hard at work on this)

Group/fold tracks and mix channels

Faster browser search

These were probably in your list, but they've been on everyones list for a while

[dioxide]

LinkedIn says 59, but that's globally and I'm unsure of how connected some of these people are to the company and it includes some Verdane investors. There are 42 people listed in Sweden and 33 in Stockholm.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/reasonstudios/

[Yonatan]

One aspect is that RS has a lot of the crew on marketing department, webpage/shop, RE maintenance/making/developer support, designers...and then there are the mobile apps development, as well as administrative staff and so on. So might be more scattered than some others I would guess, and so it is probably so that those few coders that are well familiar with the Reason code, might be drawn into helping in different more "urgent" or daunting tasks, so that basic smaller core workflow stuff might get postponed to "later". And now we have had the Rack Plugin taking main focus.

With R8, it were to be about better workflow but it was as it was interrupted and obviously the launch of "Discover" (later Allihoopa ") took a lot of resources, just to end up in the trash bin in the end.

[dioxide]

Bitwig: 17 employees
Image-Line: 43 employees
Reason Studios: 59 employees
PreSonus: 138 employees
Steinberg: 157 employees
Native Instruments: 508 employees
Ableton: 512 employees

[dioxide]

Some other Swedish companies for comparison. I always wonder if the business language makes it difficult to recruit staff. For example, the language used at Native Instruments is English and I'd think you'd be fine working and living in Berlin with English and only basic German.

Elektron: 43 employees
Teenage Engineering: 63 employees
Clavia: 21 employees

[MrFigg]

Some other Swedish companies for comparison. I always wonder if the business language makes it difficult to recruit staff. For example, the language used at Native Instruments is English and I'd think you'd be fine working and living in Berlin with English and only basic German.

Elektron: 43 employees
Teenage Engineering: 63 employees
Clavia: 21 employees

They have native English speakers working in the Stockholm office.

[dioxide]

xThey have native English speakers working in the Stockholm office.

Ah, I didn't know that. I think their job ads ask for Swedish though? EDIT: That seems to no longer to be the case, or it's no longer mentioned in the job description.

[Yonatan]

Bitwig: 17 employees
Image-Line: 43 employees
Reason Studios: 59 employees
PreSonus: 138 employees
Steinberg: 157 employees
Native Instruments: 508 employees
Ableton: 512 employees

Ableton, what the #"#!% NI I kind of expected but also Ableton, well they both have hardware too and both are german based so guess there is some kind of german logic to it.

Wonder about Logic Pro...

[Creativemind]

5

Lol!

[Creativemind]

Think about what features Reason really NEEDS. I've read your requests over the years.I added a lot of your requests to this poll https://forms.gle/4vAXcAR1FtCCG7gK8 let me tell you , your feature requests are not popular with the majority responses

These ones though, MANY people stand behind.

High resolution GPU-accelerated graphics. (mattias said they are hard at work on this)

Group/fold tracks and mix channels

Faster browser search

These were probably in your list, but they've been on everyones list for a while

Good to hear.

I think Aliased Clips, Undo History, Midi Chase and Time Markers are pretty important. A few vital mixer and audio options are pretty vital too like mono options and get rid of them damn arrows off the midi notes. I needed to duplicate a note yesterday and because the notes were so small, the note I wanted to duplicate was after the note already selected and the arrows were in the way. I couldn't click it to move nor select it to ctrl d it. Somebody suggested a while back to have the arrows vacant and then when you get a certain (I'm gonna say pixel length) length towards the beginning of end of a note the arrows appears. That sounds the most sensible approach to me.

[Creativemind]

Bitwig: 17 employees
Image-Line: 43 employees
Reason Studios: 59 employees
PreSonus: 138 employees
Steinberg: 157 employees
Native Instruments: 508 employees
Ableton: 512 employees

Interesting. Reason has more than Image-line then.

[madmacman]

:
Steinberg: 157 employees

A colleague with some friends working for Steinberg on Cubase recently told me they have >300 employees (including the usual business overhead such as HR and controlling)

[diminished]

It's really interesting to compare/correlate these numbers to the self-assigned DAW roles of popular music-making Discord servers, as in, what the young folks are actually using and what REALLY is the most popular choice for DAWs.

(Big LOL @ that MusicRadar best-DAW-poll 2020.)

This data is from the WSAP Discord (note that people can pick several DAWs as self-assigned roles):

Ableton Live 3818 members
Cubase 83 members
FL Studio 1257 members
Reaper 159 members
Logic Pro 316 members
Garage Band 41 members
Bitwig 45 members
Reason 76 members
Pro Tools 46 members
Studio One 49 members
LMMS 54 members
Cakewalk 17 members

Judging by these numbers, even Steinberg have to worry about the future.

[Yonatan]

It's really interesting to compare/correlate these numbers to the self-assigned DAW roles of popular music-making Discord servers, as in, what the young folks are actually using and what REALLY is the most popular choice for DAWs.

(Big LOL @ that MusicRadar best-DAW-poll 2020.)

This data is from the WSAP Discord (note that people can pick several DAWs as self-assigned roles):

Ableton Live 3818 members
Cubase 83 members
FL Studio 1257 members
Reaper 159 members
Logic Pro 316 members
Garage Band 41 members
Bitwig 45 members
Reason 76 members
Pro Tools 46 members
Studio One 49 members
LMMS 54 members
Cakewalk 17 members

Judging by these numbers, even Steinberg have to worry about the future.

So Ableton Live is killing it for the youngsters? And FL Studio is an even cheaper option.

[bxbrkrz]

The OP asked. The thread answered.
Case closed?

[diminished]

So Ableton Live is killing it for the youngsters? And FL Studio is an even cheaper option.

Absolutely. Even if there's a bias towards Ableton (because Ableton Live is what underbelly, the server owner, uses in his tutorial videos), these numbers are absolutely terrifying for anybody else in the game except Image-Line. They have a low employee count and high popularity. But offer life-long free updates and are pirated en-masse. So.. it's hard to judge from these numbers wether a company is healthy or not, but the popularity among young musicians is key to the future of these companies. ESPECIALLY if a software is the only product they offer.
The pro market might look a bit different right now, but let's be honest, how big is that market? It's aging as well.

That's what the next generation looks like.

Coming back to Reason Studios and the thread: their "popularity per employee-on-payroll" ratio is terrible in comparison and there is no excuse for the glacial speeds they're moving at, so I agree with Creativemind. For way too long they slept on the competition and I wonder if the RRP is enough to get their foot back into the door. We'll see.

[kitekrazy]

So Ableton Live is killing it for the youngsters? And FL Studio is an even cheaper option.

Absolutely. Even if there's a bias towards Ableton (because Ableton Live is what underbelly, the server owner, uses in his tutorial videos), these numbers are absolutely terrifying for anybody else in the game except Image-Line. They have a low employee count and high popularity. But offer life-long free updates and are pirated en-masse. So.. it's hard to judge from these numbers wether a company is healthy or not, but the popularity among young musicians is key to the future of these companies. ESPECIALLY if a software is the only product they offer.
The pro market might look a bit different right now, but let's be honest, how big is that market? It's aging as well.

That's what the next generation looks like.

Coming back to Reason Studios and the thread: their "popularity per employee-on-payroll" ratio is terrible in comparison and there is no excuse for the glacial speeds they're moving at, so I agree with Creativemind. For way too long they slept on the competition and I wonder if the RRP is enough to get their foot back into the door. We'll see.

It seems they lost their way with the economics in the DAW industry. There's no upgrade path if I buy R11 and want to jump to Suite. (that I know of) I'm not willing to jump at the upgrade for $129. With so many budget DAWs out there you have to keep your current audience. I couldn't imagine forking over $400 for a DAW these days. What every DAW developer wants for their extreme package is beyond sticker shock.

[EnochLight]

Coming back to Reason Studios and the thread: their "popularity per employee-on-payroll" ratio is terrible in comparison and there is no excuse for the glacial speeds they're moving at

It seems they lost their way with the economics in the DAW industry.

The thing is, this is the exact same thing we've been hearing for the last 16 years... yet - they seem to be doing just fine. Something tells me there's a lot wrong in what's being extrapolated from the data everyone has pulled up in this thread. Still, it's fun to speculate. Nothing is better than armchair business analysis.

[Boombastix]

From my perspective a more interesting question would be: How many coders do they have working on coding new DAW features. 1-2 maybe?

Some companies are really good at staying focused on core business development, others tend to branch out developing peripheral things and then on top of that start to add overhead. Most companies fail to succeed with non-core business activities.
I think RS with Allihopa, RE in web-browser, RE in Elk, they lost focus on DAW development and RE SDK development. Now the SDK is unable to attract most plugin developers, and the documentation is a mess in my opinion, and the DAW features is falling behind while the others add 20-50 new features/fixes each upgrade cycle.

Of course some things are annoying but has fairly easy work arounds, other things have not and then you have a hard time to use Reason.

When everything is crackling and you are unable to track freeze, it is very hard to continue. You have to manually bounce, put in place holders, make not of what was originally used, and do that with 3-4 tracks just to continue, then put them back if you want to compose an alternative verse part or bridge. That is just horrendous.
VST midi out is another of those that doesn't have a "functional" work around.
Midi comping (while recording), same thing, doesn't have a "functional" work around.

1. Track freeze.
2. VST midi out.
3. Midi comping.
Those features are much needed to actually write / produce songs.

I know the community wish list is long, but all that is secondary to me, as they are "nice to haves" but won't stop me from making great composition/productions.

As for "their current list":
High resolution GPU-accelerated graphics. (mattias said they are hard at work on this). No my top priority: All my VSTs are nice and large, so when I need to dial in stuff in an RE it is not very often and I put my nose closer to the screen, takes my <1sec.

Group/fold tracks and mix channels No my top priority: Sure nice to stay organized, but this is only needed with many many tracks, using the big synths makes my 3.5GHz 4-core i7 crackle long before organization is an issue. Track freeze is WAY more important.

Faster browser search Yeah the browser sucks, but my VSTs has, most of the time, super nice browsers. But unless I can choose my default RE folder and RE patch, it will fall short. Unless my personal RE patch folder, my Refill patches, AND factory patches for one and the same RE are all showing up in one window that allows tagging, and favorite-ing, then it falls short. My VSTs does that...

[joeyluck]

How many staff?

5

[diminished]

Nothing is better than armchair business analysis.

[MrFigg]

How many staff?

5

[Dogcat]

All 5 Reason Studio's staff...