During August & September 2015 we hosted a massive music gear contest, with $33,000 worth of hardware and software prizes on offer. As part of the contest we asked YOU to complete a survey about your music production habits. One of the questions was about your primary MIDI controller brand. Almost 25,000 musicians and producers gave their answer. 

Before we dive into the results, first let’s check out some interesting “facts” from the survey…

• 25% of Focusrite audio interface owners use Ableton Live, while just 15% use Logic Pro X. 
• Nearly 40% of Apogee owners use Logic Pro X as their primary DAW.
• Over one quarter of Universal Audio interface owners use Pro Tools as their primary DAW, 
• 33% of Steinberg audio interface users prefer using Cubase.
• Only 10% of Focusrite interface owners consider themselves primarily as singer/songwriters, while 27% consider themselves producers.
• 14.5% of M-Audio interface owners use FL Studio, and marginally more use Ableton Live at 16.5%.

The Best MIDI Controller Brand?

With so many different features on offer from controller to controller and every budget possible involved, there simply is no “best” MIDI controller. There might well be a best for your needs or workflow. So when choosing a MIDI controller, it’s a good idea to look at brand popularity, read reviews online, and ensure it has the required knobs, buttons, keys, encoders, display, etc. that you desire, and is designed to work well with the DAW or software of your choice.

So, out of approx. 25,000 musicians, producers and engineers who answered our survey, let’s take a look at the results.

And The Most Popular MIDI Controller manufacturer (as Voted For By You) Is…

Bear in mind that only one MIDI controller brand could be chosen from our survey list. So many of us who use two or more controllers were forced to choose their “primary” one. This means some might appear to be less popular than they are in our results. However, this still makes for interesting reading, especially as most MIDI controller manufacturers are hesitant to publish figures about their sales and users. These results give us a snap shot of what a cross-section of us consider their favorite music controller brands.

The Top 5 MIDI Controller brands of 2015

The complete results of the MIDI controller brand survey.

• M-Audio - 21.36%
• Akai Professional - 13.82%
• Native Instruments - 10.31%
• Novation - 8.74%
• Korg - 5.62%
• Yamaha - 5.43%
• Ableton - 4.64%
• Roland - 4.41%
• Alesis - 2.88%
• Arturia - 2.29%
• Behringer - 1.59%
• Nektar - 1.23%
• Nord - 0.57%
• CME - 0.49%
• Keith McMillen - 0.32%
• Livid Instruments - 0.23%
• Other - 16.07%

Just because we love stats and we love you all, here's an interesting infographic focusing on the top 5 audio interface brands. You can download it as a PDF here.

InfoGraphic - Most Popular MIDI Controller Brands of 2015