The Internet Tattoo Awards: Best Music Products and Tech of 2025
Every year, music tech gives us more better and better tools to achieve that sound we hear in our heads. Most of it is good. Some of it is very good, and then there’s a smaller group of releases that actually stick—the plugins you keep reaching for, the gear that earns desk space, the creators and developers that quietly shift how people work. The Internet Tattoo Awards are about that last group. These picks aren’t about hype, spec sheets, or trying to crown a single “winner” in every category. They reflect what genuinely mattered in 2025: tools that showed up in real projects, companies that understood their audience, and releases that felt aligned with where electronic music, DJ culture, and modern production are actually heading. Some choices are obvious, others more opinionated—but all of them earned their place in our hearts.
Best Plugin Synth of 2025 - Arturia JUP-8000 V
Picking a major developer’s recreation of a vintage classic is usually one of the least interesting choices you can make. It’s safe, predictable, and often aimed more at nostalgia than innovation. JUP-8000 V breaks that pattern by being genuinely fun, immediately playable, and—most importantly—useful in modern productions. It captures the spirit of the original JP-8000 without feeling stuck in time, delivering supersaws that hit hard, leads that cut without excess processing, and pads that sit naturally in dense mixes.
What really earns it this award is how well it fits into today’s workflows. The interface feels fast, the modulation options are expanded just enough to matter, and the sound design range goes far beyond trance clichés if you push it. Whether you’re making rave-leaning club tracks, hyperpop-adjacent textures, or wonk rage type beats, JUP-8000 V feels like a synth you reach for on purpose—not one you open “because you should.” In a year full of ambitious releases, this was the one that consistently delivered without overthinking itself.
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Most Exciting Synth of 2025 – Telepathic Instruments Orchid
Where a lot of hardware synths try to replicate classic gear, The Orchid stood out because it felt genuinely different. In a landscape where most new synths are iterations on familiar ideas, Telepathic Instruments released something that sparked curiosity and inspiration. Orchid feels more like an instrument you discover over time than a product you fully understand after reading a feature list, and that sense of mystery is a big part of its appeal.
What makes Orchid exciting isn’t just the sound, but the intent behind it. The interface encourages exploration, the sonic results lean emotional and tactile, and the whole experience feels deliberately unoptimized in the best way. It doesn’t try to replace your main workhorse synth or compete on versatility—it exists to inspire melodic ideas. In a year crowded with capable tools, Orchid earned its spot by reminding producers that excitement still matters.
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The Innovative Plugin of 2025 – Output Co-Producer
Where a lot of plugins promise to speed up your workflow, Co-Producer actually changes it. Instead of acting like another instrument or effect you have to learn, Output’s AI-assisted VST sits in the background and helps you make decisions—arrangement ideas, sound suggestions, and creative nudges that feel closer to collaboration than automation. It doesn’t try to write music for you; it helps you move forward when momentum stalls.
What makes Co-Producer innovative is how restrained it feels. The suggestions are contextual, optional, and easy to ignore if they don’t fit your vision. That balance is rare in AI-driven music tools, which often swing between gimmicky and overbearing. Co-Producer works because it respects the producer’s taste and agency, acting more like a second set of ears than a shortcut machine. In 2025, that kind of thoughtful AI integration felt genuinely new.
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Best Pro Audio VST of 2025 – FabFilter Pro-Q 4
At this point, Pro-Q winning anything almost feels cliché—and maybe that’s why it deserves the award. Pro-Q 4 didn’t reinvent EQ, but it refined something that most producers and engineers touch on every single track of their sessions. The improvements are subtle, thoughtful, and clearly aimed at people who already rely on it daily: faster workflows, clearer visual feedback, and small quality-of-life changes that add up over long sessions.
What keeps Pro-Q 4 at the top is trust. You open it knowing it won’t get in the way, won’t color your sound unexpectedly, and won’t demand attention unless you need it to. In a year full of flashy processors and AI-driven promises, Pro-Q 4 stands out by being relentlessly professional. It’s the kind of tool that doesn’t chase trends—yet quietly defines the standard everyone else measures against.
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Coolest DJ Hardware of 2025 – AlphaTheta CDJ-3000X
The CDJ-3000X didn’t need to reinvent the CDJ to make an impact—it just needed to refine it. AlphaTheta’s update lands in that sweet spot where everything feels faster, cleaner, and more deliberate, without alienating DJs who already know the ecosystem inside out. It’s familiar in the way a professional tool should be, but refined enough that you notice the difference immediately once you’re playing.
What earns it the “coolest” title isn’t just performance—it’s presence. The 3000X feels like the center of modern club culture right now, not because it’s flashy, but because it quietly sets expectations. Playability, reliability, and subtle workflow improvements matter more than novelty at this level, and the CDJ-3000X nails that balance. It’s the rare piece of gear that feels both inevitable and earned.
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Best Indie Developer of 2025 – Safari Pedals
Safari Pedals has quietly carved out a unique space in the plugin world by bringing the spirit of creative hardware stompboxes into software form. Their lineup leans into character-driven processors with bold personalities—from gritty bitcrushers and wild reverbs to unconventional EQs and punchy compressors that feel playful and musical. The interfaces invite exploration, but beneath the visual identity there’s a clear focus on sound quality and expressive potential.
In 2025, that momentum continued with releases like Noam’s Mastering Console, the Hippie Elephant reverb, and the Pixel Cat bit crusher. Safari Pedals also showed a willingness to experiment beyond traditional releases through collaborations and limited free offerings, reinforcing a brand identity rooted in openness and curiosity. What stands out most is how widely their plugins are being adopted across genres—from lofi and hip hop to experimental electronic—as fast, expressive tools for shaping mood and identity rather than purely technical processors.
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Best New Budget Gear of 2025 – Behringer CZ-1 MINI
The CZ-1 MINI is Behringer doing what it does best: taking an idea that would normally live behind nostalgia, rarity, or inflated prices and making it immediately accessible. Inspired by the digital phase-distortion lineage, it delivers sharp, glassy tones and quirky harmonic movement that still feel distinctive today—especially in a market saturated with analog-leaning designs.
What makes this release stand out isn’t just the tiny price tag, though. Digital textures are back in a big way, and the CZ-1 MINI slots perfectly into that renewed interest without pretending to be something it’s not. It’s small, focused, and unapologetically weird in places, which makes it a great secondary synth for producers who already have the basics covered and want something characterful without overthinking the purchase.
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Best YouTube Channel of 2025 – Julien Earle
Julien Earle’s channel is a breath of fresh air in my YouTube Subscriptions feed. Julien’s tutorials are direct, stylistically current, and grounded in the kind of music people are actually trying to make right now—modern electronic, club-adjacent, and internet-native genres that often get ignored by more traditional education channels. There’s no filler, no algorithm-chasing theatrics, just clear ideas and solid execution.
What really sets Julien apart is the transparency. Offering to sell the project files used in the videos closes the gap between watching and doing, and it shows a level of respect for viewers that’s still surprisingly rare. In a year where music YouTube felt increasingly bloated, this channel stood out by staying lean, practical, and musically relevant.
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Best Tutorial or Educational Series of 2025 – SEEDJ
SEEDJ offers various learning programs in the left-field EDM niche, and the platform earns this spot by giving a tribune to DJs and artists who might not have created mid-length tutorials otherwise. Their many series are structured, intentional, and clearly designed for people who want to develop taste, confidence, and musical direction—not just technical proficiency. It treats DJing and beatmaking as a craft that evolves over time, which makes it feel more grounded than quick-hit tip content.
The strength of SEEDJ lies in how it balances fundamentals with context. Instead of chasing trends or gear-specific tricks, it builds a framework that DJs and producers can adapt to different scenes and setups. In a crowded education space, that long-view approach made it one of the most genuinely useful learning resources of the year.
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Coolest Gear Brand of 2025 – Native Instruments
2025 was a year where Native Instruments re-engaged with its community and broadened its presence across DJing, beatmaking, and creative workflows in ways that felt meaningful. After a stretch where NI’s direction sometimes felt uncertain, this year brought renewed focus, steady updates to core platforms, and fresh energy in parts of their lineup that matter to producers and performers alike.
On the software side, NI delivered incremental but truly useful updates across major tools like Maschine, Kontakt, and the Native Access ecosystem, smoothing out workflows and showing consistent development momentum rather than abandoning key products. A standout moment was the return of Absynth with version 6—a cult-classic semi-modular synth revived with modern features like MPE support and a new AI-powered preset explorer that bridges legacy sound design with 2025 sensibilities.
NI also doubled down on accessibility and community, launching entry-level DJ software like Traktor Play and announcing broader hardware partnerships through the Native Kontrol Standard program so more controllers and ecosystems play nicely with their sound library. What ties all of these moves together is a sense of reconnection—to users, to the broader scene, and to the idea that a gear brand can be both established and genuinely inspiring. In an industry crowded with fleeting trends, that grounded resurgence earns Native Instruments the 2025 Coolest Gear Brand nod.
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BONUS: Most Read Posts of 2025
The two most popular posts this year were The Best Plugins to Produce Drift Phonk Beats and The Best Lofi Plugins: All the VSTs You Need to Make Chill Hip Hop Beats. That outcome isn’t really about individual articles—it’s a reflection of where producer attention is concentrated right now.
Beatmaking scenes that live online move fast and define themselves through sound design as much as songwriting. Genres like drift phonk and lofi rely on very specific textures, processing choices, and tonal cues, which pushes producers to look for tools that can get them there quickly. Instead of browsing endlessly or experimenting blindly, people are actively searching for plugins that already fit the sound they’re aiming for. The popularity of these posts points to that larger shift: plugins aren’t just utilities anymore, they’re part of how scenes form, spread, and evolve.
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