Quarterly Analysis

Avid Pro Tools remains at the top of the rankings followed by ImageLine FL Studio. Ableton Live was the biggest gainer moving up two slots to the third position. Adobe Audition and Apple Logic also moved up one slot each to the fifth and seventh positions. Losers this quarter were Steinberg Cubase and Cakewalk Sonar which dropped to the sixth and eighth positions. Google made a major revision to its estimating algorithm in May 2011 which continues to have a significant impact on the rankings of all products. In order to provide continuity with previous data, the index is now being reported as an annual moving average of four quarters.

How do you know this stuff?

The music software popularity index is based on recent Internet search activity on Google, Yahoo, AOL & Microsoft. Collectively these 4 search engines represent approximately than 95 percent of the searches on the Internet. Over 100 search terms are used to construct this index.

We have been publishing this index for over 5 years now, and the rankings have been generally stable. Here are the changes in rankings from the past quarter. Fifteen products are tracked in this index. More...