I'm looking to survey DAW users to understand usage and demographics

[seadoubleyoujay]

Hey fellow Ableton users, as a personal project I'm looking to gather data about DAW usage and the background of people who use DAWs. I'm posting this survey around several subreddits and forums geared towards production with the hope of finding interesting trends in these communities. As someone who's gone through a few DAWs before settling on one that fit my workflow (while still using additional ones for certain tasks), I've wondered about potential similarities in the journey that many of us go through while pursuing this wonderful hobby.

The survey takes roughly 10-15 minutes (though can be completed quicker), and will be active for a week or two before I close off the responses and start compiling the data. All of my results will be posted with raw data, fixed data, and infographics publicly for everyone to access. All responses are anonymous and no data will be shared or sold. I would love to hear from anyone across all skill levels and all communities, so feel free to post, repost, share or do whatever else you would like with this survey!

Survey link: https://forms.gle/ADfb8BNoEqLer6gAA

Added note: there have been some issues with completing the survey on mobile devices. Copying the link and pasting it directly into a browser has helped some users, but Google Forms might still have some issues there.

[miyaru]

Did so, was fun to do!

[doghouse]

Interested in seeing how the percentages change as time goes on, but I was surprised to see that as of today Reaper was the most used DAW (and FL the second!), and how few use Rewire or Link.

[seadoubleyoujay]

First off, thanks for going through the survey, it's definitely awesome to see the preliminary data and it'll be even more interesting once I can clean up the text responses.

Interested in seeing how the percentages change as time goes on, but I was surprised to see that as of today Reaper was the most used DAW (and FL the second!), and how few use Rewire or Link.

The most used DAW part might be affected by the amount of users in a given sub that end up taking the survey, which becomes a form of bias that I plan to try and address with some weighting once the survey is over (this is actually why I ask what subreddit or forum brought people to the survey). That said, it can be difficult to come up with a method that accurately tackles the issue, which is why I've been targeting some more generic music production subs to try and get more varied responses and see how the distribution changes. For ReWire and Link, I was super surprised too, I was under the impression before starting this that both were used more often.

[Multicellular]

First off, thanks for going through the survey, it's definitely awesome to see the preliminary data and it'll be even more interesting once I can clean up the text responses.

Interested in seeing how the percentages change as time goes on, but I was surprised to see that as of today Reaper was the most used DAW (and FL the second!), and how few use Rewire or Link.

The most used DAW part might be affected by the amount of users in a given sub that end up taking the survey, which becomes a form of bias that I plan to try and address with some weighting once the survey is over (this is actually why I ask what subreddit or forum brought people to the survey). That said, it can be difficult to come up with a method that accurately tackles the issue, which is why I've been targeting some more generic music production subs to try and get more varied responses and see how the distribution changes. For ReWire and Link, I was super surprised too, I was under the impression before starting this that both were used more often.

Ya. That's a tough one. As that sampling bias might be indicative of things in either direction.
On one hand, you might have more people frequenting a forum and then taking the survey because there are more users of that DAW. Of course, that sampling bias is aligned with correct indication of usage.
On the other hand, back when I used ProTools, I was on the forum all the time because I had so many damn problems with it lol. I don't come here very often* or to the Reaper forum because I simply am able to easily figure out anything I need to do and [knocks on wood] don't have performance issues.


*Although more often than my post count would show. Forgot I'd used an old email previously and just made a new account out of laziness.