2025 DAW Rankings: How 3,222 Music Producers Make Music

A survey of 3,222 music producers for the 2025 DAW rankings reveals trends in music production. Logic Pro and Studio One rank near the top, while Pro Tools remains a leading industry standard in professional studios. More than 70% of respondents use a DAW several times a week, and many spend over 15 hours on each song. The results also show Japan-specific preferences, with J-pop, anime songs, and Vocaloid accounting for more than half of reported genres, alongside growing use of laptops for music production.

Popular DAWs Used by Music Producers

Our year-end survey received responses from an amazing 3,222 music producers!
Thank you very much to everyone who took part. We are truly grateful.

Here are the results, ranked by the DAWs used by the 3,222 respondents.
We also asked about how often and how long people make music, so let’s take a look at these habits as well.

2025 DAW Rankings (Video)

Selected Questions and Answers from the YouTube Video

UA LUNA gets a lot of promotion, but it’s free and still didn’t make the top 10?

One possible reason is that it is not yet available in Japanese. That can be a significant hurdle, especially for beginners.

For desktop users, a laptop screen feels too small, and not being able to use two displays is really tough. Once you get used to the convenience of two screens, it’s hard to go back.

Many people keep a monitor at home and connect their laptop to it for a dual-screen setup while producing music.

I want to use my FANTOM-08 (with a built-in audio interface) as a MIDI keyboard for music production. Is there a difference between connecting it directly to my PC and connecting it through another audio interface?

Since the FANTOM-08 has a built-in audio interface, using it directly seems like the most efficient option.

A pro uses REAPER as their main DAW?

We’ve heard of professionals who extensively customize REAPER to fine-tune how it works. Once mastered to that degree, it might be the ultimate DAW...

It’s no surprise that Singer Song Writer didn’t make the list. I wonder where it would rank. Mine suddenly stopped launching today, and I’m trying to fix it. Given its track-count limits, I’m also considering switching to Ability. But changing DAWs is hard when I need compatibility with my past projects.

Only one respondent listed Singer Song Writer as their main DAW. Fourteen people used Ability, so perhaps many have made the switch.

I wonder why REAPER has such high user satisfaction and so few dissatisfied users. It also seems to have a fairly high proportion of professional users. What makes it appealing? I’d love a feature on what makes it uniquely useful in professional settings.

Common reasons included its low price, free version, high customizability, and lightweight, stable performance.

Respondent Profile

First, let’s look at the respondents.

The gender breakdown has barely changed over the past few years, and the overwhelming majority are men.
More women making music could broaden the range of products and help events thrive.
We also see encouraging more women to start making music as an area we should work on.

Many respondents are young, particularly those aged 30 or under.
It is also great to see nearly 100 respondents aged 60 or older.

Encouragingly, about one in ten respondents works as a professional!
We’d love to hear your comments on tutorials and products on YouTube and X.

Computers

Next, let’s look at computers, an essential part of music production.
We plan to create more detailed content on this topic later, so here we’ll cover the basics.

Mac or Windows

There has been no major change since last year.
We also found no significant differences by age.

A few years ago, Apple began using its own CPUs, Apple Silicon, across its Mac lineup.
We have been watching to see how this affects the share of Mac users, but so far it does not appear to have had a major impact on music production.

Desktop or Laptop

When we founded our company, people often said that music production required a desktop computer for adequate performance. I remember frequently experiencing that limitation myself.
But today,laptops are fully capable of handling music production and related work.

It is also interesting that younger respondents are more likely to choose laptops.

Music Production

Next, let’s look at music production, including how often people make music and which genres they work in.

More than half of respondents make vocal-driven music, such as J-pop and band-style music.
This may be a trend specific to Japan.
Electronic music, including EDM, comes next.

More than 70% of respondents use a DAW several times a week—an encouraging result.

Thirty-five percent spend at least three hours per session.
That gives a sense of how focused people are.
When you get into the zone, time seems to disappear—that’s one of the joys of making music with a DAW.

As for the time needed to finish one song, roughly speaking,most respondents spend 15 hours or more on a single song.
Each song clearly takes a great deal of energy and dedication.

Let’s compare production time by genre.
J-pop, anime songs, and Vocaloid tracks often have many parts and frequent arrangement changes, so they tend to take longer to produce. (They may also involve vocal recording.)
By contrast, hip-hop and background music often use fewer tracks and more repetition or loops, so they may take less time to produce than other genres.

DAW Rankings

Now, let’s get to the DAW rankings.
Until last year, we counted main and secondary DAWs together. Since the feature gap between DAWs has narrowed, this year we counted only each respondent’s main DAW.

First, let’s look at places 6 through 10.

The rankings were unchanged from last year.
One surprising result: out of 3,222 respondents, only 111 used the sixth-place DAW, Pro Tools.
That means more votes went to the higher-ranked DAWs.

About Pro Tools

Pro Tools, ranked sixth, is an industry-standard DAW.

It has a particularly high share of professional users.
Let’s take a closer look at why people chose it.