I'd be curious to know who they are and what they're selling.

Audio software is a quite unusual field for all sorts of reasons, largely related to the huge divide between professional users and amateurs. The old school of pro-audio people can remember when a studio cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to equip and will pay pretty much any price you ask, even for quite trivial software. Your typical teenage dance-music producer is buying many of the same applications and will usually baulk at paying $99 for a cut-down version, let alone several hundred dollars for a full license.

It's interesting that really intrusive DRM techniques are broadly accepted - iLok is probably the most popular system, which requires you to buy a $50 USB dongle in addition to a very expensive piece of software. Again, experienced professionals who can remember tape see an iLok as a trivial inconvenience, but to a lot of younger people it's a total deal-breaker.

The music technology industry is part way through a weird economic transition. The traditional high-value professional market is dwindling away to nothing, but business has never been better because of the boom in amateur production. Firms like Native Instruments who have figured out how to sell to wannabe DJs and bedroom producers are shaking the money tree; A lot of very old and established names are struggling to keep the doors open.

That would make sense, considering that music production software tends to be viciously expensive, and music producers tend to not have much money.

and there is resistance to using the free software alternatives, thus leading to a cycle where the free software alternatives don't get feedback/criticism.

Teenagers especially are really influenced by brands. I keep suggesting that 'industry standard' = 'same as all the others' and that being a bit different might be a good idea. No dice.

The free software alternatives are all absolutely terrible. Ardour is the leader amongst free DAWs, and is very nearly as good as Pro Tools was ten or fifteen years ago. There's no good free sequencer, no good sampler, no good reverb. Audio software is just too niche and too difficult; It requires a lot of skills that are rare in the free software community.

Well, some people seem to manage with these tools! And if more people were introduced to them, perhaps the feedback and number of interested coders would increase.

I admit I was thinking more of supercollider and puredata, so more 'sonic arts' I suppose.

Until there is a open-source program that replicates what Ableton Live offers (seamless and easy-to-use integration of audio recording and nonlinear editing with MIDI production), no one will consider using an open-source tool.

The biggest hurdle from my point of view is that low-latency audio on operating systems that are not Windows or OS X is a joke. Some organization needs to sink and huge chunk of developer time into either improving the user and developer experience of JACK or writing something new. Maybe once that is in place and starts shipping in vanilla Ubuntu (no special kernel requirement either!) the user software developers will be able to start catching up with the tools available on the Win/Mac platforms.

Easy to use? I've played with some of these tools, including Ableton Live and I've never found any that is actually easy to use.

They are all too stuck in the sliders/knobs metaphor. I'm not sure it's an adequate metaphor for people who has not produced in the physical world before.

If cageface's data is accurate, the expense of the software would not explain the sudden drop. Do music producers suddenly get poorer after a crack is released?

The pressure to buy at a painful price is suddenly removed.

I suppose times have changed, but back in the 90's music software companies used to leak their software to groups to get cracked (this was back when Radium was the defacto group). In fact, #audiowarez used to be a 50/50 split between devs and users iirc. Memory is a little dusty.

Even if that was a real effect I'd imagine it would be hard to spot. The alternative, that they're seeing what they expect to see seems just as likely, if not more.