Appearance of more subscription models.

I am wondering if anyone wants to join in on a discussion of the apparent trend in the music software community to switch to subscription models.
 
I admit I was a bit disturbed at first by Sonar switching to an annual subscription model, but I finally decided I like the deal and what it offers in terms of updates. A few hundred dollars a year seemed reasonable for what Sonar has to offer as a DAW.
 
However, today I noted that EastWest has gone over to a subscription model for its large number of instruments and plugins where the cheapest subscription plan seemed to be $30 a month for access to 7 products. If you allow your subscription to lapse you can no longer use the instruments. Hmmmm.
 
It would seem that if many of these music software companies start switching to such a model, then many of us home studio enthusiasts would be unable to afford to keep our plugin / vst libraries going for very long. I have about 20 high end libraries that I like to upgrade by choice, but if I found myself forced to subscribe or lose the right to use them, I would not be able to afford the many thousands of dollars a year for such subscription models.
 
I think many of these companies are facing short falls because even professional studios are not making the profits they once were able to generate and have taken some steps to cut costs. I would only guess that growing competition and dwindling funding is cutting down the slice of the pie for music software developers.
 
Many of us represent a source of income for these companies who have not been highlights of their financial years, but have contributed to their success through our willingness to save up and purchase quality products. But I see a future at least for me where I will not be able to continue to fund subscriptions. I perhaps would have to support the small developers who might not have the coding resources for shiny products but who at least could be innovative.
 
Just wondering what others think ... Am I being too paranoid or just realistic?

Some here feel the monthly fee for SONAR is "acceptable" even if it means they pay more over 12 months that I did for my yearly subscription. As noted with SONAR we both (monthly and annual payers) get to keep our products.
 
East West on the other hand would best be served by the SONAR model but probably with a three or five year payment plan. I own their composers collection which meant that I had to make finite choices. With that, I have what I want from them. I can't see me ever going for their subscription service until they have an end game plan where I own everything.
 
Personally I think EW's choice may well be the death of them. Unless I am in the minority of musicians who want to own what I use to make music.

BobF
I've been predicting the emergence of regular payment models for a long time.  It's the only way software companies will be able to survive.
 
 

Or fold under even less in sales than previously.

bapu

BobF
I've been predicting the emergence of regular payment models for a long time.  It's the only way software companies will be able to survive.
 
 

Or fold under even less in sales than previously.

You think burger flippers have high expectations for pay?  You should hear what software engineers expect.  Yes, I agree.  All companies certainly won't survive this change in the industry.  Most changes see casualties.
 
It's funny how a lot of people want to pay as little as possible for things they want, but at the same time press for the absolute most they can get for their own efforts.

BobF
You should hear what software engineers expect.  Yes, I agree.  

Ummmmmmm  I am a software engineer (for over 30 years).
 
Today, because they can, companies are pay 30-50% less than they did 5 years ago. I know from direct experience.
 
I am grateful that I am still in this field but the new standards for pay is tough.

Karyn

I admit I was a bit disturbed at first by Sonar switching to an annual subscription model,

 
Sonar is NOT subscription.  You can pay in full, or you can pay in instalments.  There is no subscription option.

I stand corrected, but feel free to substitute the word "Membership" for "Subscription" if I must use the official terminology.

Karyn

lludwick

Karyn

I admit I was a bit disturbed at first by Sonar switching to an annual subscription model,

 
Sonar is NOT subscription.  You can pay in full, or you can pay in instalments.  There is no subscription option.

I stand corrected, but feel free to substitute the word "Membership" for "Subscription" if I must use the official terminology.

Didn't mean to sound like I was getting at you, but subscription is how Photoshop is "sold" and is nothing like the Cakewalk model.

 
 
Agreed. That is why I am fully satisfied with the CW plan.  I understand these other companies don't want to offer their full line of software to people without proper compensation, but there always should be a point where you have paid enough, can end the plan and not have everything taken away from you.

I don't know about the newest model for Sonar, but some variation on this model seems to be the way everyone is going. Can you believe what they tell you about the benefits? I don't know, but the reason I bought in to Platinum was to find out. Most of the great software I use has become less user friendly over time or has gone to a payment model that I don't care for.
 
I'm closely watching what happens with my 1 year membership. Ive seen a couple things that I don't like. For example, the Platinum releases are not cumulative, instead they are one-off's from what I can tell. Lets say I decide to sit out one year of membership and one day a feature comes out that I think is really cool. There's no way to tell if you get that feature when you buy in once again. That's the single biggest issue for me and I feel pressured into keeping the membership going to prevent this.
 
They should be a clear code telling us that this months update is a one off freebie or a change to the core program. When they blend it all together you don't know what you are supporting and that makes it hard for me to truly judge the value. IF a new user buys Platinum tomorrow, what do they get? 

slartabartfast

BobF
I've been predicting the emergence of regular payment models for a long time. It's the only way software companies will be able to survive.

 
What has changed in the last fifty years that makes it impossible for a software developer to survive using the license purchase model? And what existential threat to the software business has suddenly arisen that requires a change to a subscription model? I can imagine one unlikely factor, but I would be interested in understanding your reasons for making this statement.

IMO it's a few things that have come together to bring us to where we are.  I think DAW software, like any niche market solution, is especially sensitive to these:
- available talent pool has grown exponentially, reducing expense and therefore the entry barrier to competition is also reduced.
- tools have become more productive and produce more efficient code, reducing talent requirements, reduced entry barrier.
- DAW software overall has matured to the point that incremental improvements in successive version are reduced; point of diminishing return on continued investment.  Less motivation for users to upgrade.
 
All of the top tier DAWs are feature rich and they are now competing with each other instead of hardware.  This makes the ROI much less by orders of magnitude. 
 
When enough people start skipping versions, the revenue stream is reduced.  The alternatives are to increase revenue from existing customers and/or increase market share.  Increasing market share in a market as fractured as the DAW market has got to require live sacrifice.
 
Seriously - every DAW out there has the ability to reliably capture what you play when you click REC.  Yes, there is workflow -we all hate avoidable repetitive motion- but how much in real dollars is workflow worth to amateurs, and how many pro studios are there out there to sell software to?  We're back to ROI again, and in the pro shops the time req'd to become proficient with new tools is real money.  There has to be a compelling case to make a switch ... so, how much of an increase in market share is realistic?
 
No, I don't really see an alternative that keeps them in business.  Bring enough value to the table to keep existing customers paying [relatively] small amounts on an ongoing basis.
 
The only question in my mind is whether or not the value will be there.  This will be tricky next year, and will continue to get trickier as memberships get staggered throughout the year.  '15 was easy to sell because there was a sizable initial drop.  In theory, the only new stuff in the future will be smaller monthly releases.  How will I feel about paying 2 bills to continue another year with nothing "big" right away?
 
I dunno ... that's why I keep saying "we'll see".  Not much time left in the first year to establish a rep that motivates people to continue without hesitation.
 
I really don't see an alternative to the model though short of a month to month 'right to use' fee that other companies have already adopted.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3209530
 
We are pretty much on the same page about the real problem with software sales. The lowered cost of development issue should result in less danger to survival. If you can produce a good product for a really low cost , you should be able to last forever, even if your competition is in the same boat.
 
The real issue is, as you note, that many types of software have reached the stage of development that nothing of any real critical functional value can be added. That level was reached with office suites at Office 2000, and DAW's are rapidly approaching this level. This stage in the development of the automobile came even before  electric windows became standard, and until something other than internal combustion becomes the new norm, most people can get where they are going with any automobile made since the 1930's on. The advantage that the auto industry has, is that they make a product that wears out and needs to be replaced, so they can sell new cars to old customers, and do not have to depend on new customers reaching driving age. Software just does not wear out, and it is likely that for a very reasonable cost we will be able to run Windows 7 and the software that it supports for the rest of our lives.
 
So, if the incentive to spend a lot of money on frequent upgrades is being lost as the basic function of the software reaches a practical limit, does the subscription model actually save the software industry? Will buyers be willing to pay forever (resulting eventually in many times the present cost for the same amount of use),  for something that has not increased in value? They will if they have no choice. So far the developers who have gone subscription, have had an effective monopoly on their product. That monopoly can be defined by the term "industry standard." If you are a professional in the image editing business, you will at some point be required to submit work or edit other's work using Adobe Photoshop. If you are running most kinds of business, you will need to use MS Office in a version compatible with the people you are trying to collaborate with. In music the analogous program is probably ProTools. It is not that you cannot use other programs for these functions (all word processors produce text and all DAW's produce wave and AIIF ), but that unless everyone you are working with professionally has access to the same software you will have trouble talking to each other, bothersome and costly glitches and incompatibilities. 
 
That does not mean that there are not a very large number of users who are interested more in the product than in the method of getting it. Hence the large number of image editors available for reasonable cost to amateur photographers, and the many DAW's competing mainly for amateur musicians. If the big names are willing to compete on cost they can probably drive out the rabble in a relatively short time and then squeeze the customers with the less product for much more money inherent in the subscription model. So far that has not been the case, prices for subscriptions are generally unconscionably high.  Some limited number of industry leading developers will do very well under the subscription model, but most of their competitors will not have this option available. They will have to compete with each other on price and features, and lower prices will result in less investment in new features, leaving them further behind the industry leader. It is a recipe for the development of a true monopoly and not at all good news for consumers.
 
The subscription model, touted as a way to always provide the newest features, is actually a very strong incentive to not add any extra features at all. The electric company does not have to provide a new version of peppier power every year, it just has to have the ability to turn off the lights if you do not pay the monthly bill. The only option available to customers who do not require the industry standard application is to avoid like the plague getting hooked on a lesser app that tries to sell them on a subscription.
 

 
So far, and I have to be honest, Platinum has been a bit of a disappointment to me.
 
There are a few nice refinements and additions, but I'm starting to wish I'd stuck with X3 and sat it out for a bit. When my annual subscription membership expires, I will be taking a long hard look at whether or not I will shell out straight away, if at all.
 
 
 
 

SteveStrummerUK
 
So far, and I have to be honest, Platinum has been a bit of a disappointment to me.
 
There are a few nice refinements and additions, but I'm starting to wish I'd stuck with X3 and sat it out for a bit. When my annual subscription membership expires, I will be taking a long hard look at whether or not I will shell out straight away, if at all.
 
 
 
 

I'm sort of on the same page. My favourite change with Plat was the improved control bar, but it got broken on the second release. I'm sorry to say I haven't been able to use most of the Anderton content because I can't get the hang of his music style with the loops. I really hope this is not the trend for all releases.
 
I'm taking it 1 year at a time but I have managed to get 4 people on the Sonar bandwagon so Cakewalk got their moneys worth out of having me as a customer.

 
 
I still don't understand the continuing and seemingly endless (favourable) and unnecessary comparisions between the SONAR model and the Adobe model.
 
If they are so dissimilar, why do so many of you have to keep on pointing it out. We're intelligent people, we know they're not the same and how they differ.
 
As it happens, I subscribe to Adobe's Photography Plan which allows me to use Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5 (now Lightroom CC), and before I did so, I undertook a detailed bit of research into whether it was worth it for me, or not. I compared the price of subscribing to this Plan against my average spend on upgrading the 'buy to keep' versions of Photoshop Elements and Lightroom. As I'd planned/budgetted on upgrading to each new version of Lightroom and to every second or third version of Elements (so far I've purchased #2, #5, #8, #10 and #11), the main comparison was of course the price.
 
As it happens, the two alternatives work out very similar (it was about 50p a month on average more to subscribe to the Plan), so the decision then had to be based on two other factors - namely the extra features Photoshop offers over it's little brother Elements; and the fact that I'd get to keep each 'purchased' version of Elements and Lightroom against simply 'renting' the Photography software.
 
As it transpired, and after giving Photoshop a pretty intensive (free) month's demo, I decided that the best option for me was the subscription model.
 
As it so happens, Lightroom 5 has today been superseded by Lightroom 6/Lightroom CC - the former is the purchase outright version and CC is the Creative Cloud version. I'm downloading CC as I type
 
As far as new features and workflows are concerned, I have to say that the change from Lightroom 5 to 6/CC is light years ahead of that from SONAR X3 to Platinum. The feature that's got my attention is Lightroom's newly added ability to merge multiple images to HDR inside the program, as opposed to exporting them outside to Photoshop, Photomatix Pro or Nik HDR. This might not seem quite so momentous, but the biggie is that Lightroom allows you to merge to a Digital Negative DNG (similar to RAW) file. All the other programs merge the source images to JPEG or TIFF. TIFFs are good, but have nowhere near as much information and latitude as DNG/RAW. A similar process can be achieved in Photomatix to create a 32bit merged file, but this 'image' can only be reopened by a program that can handle HDR 'coded' files.
 
With the addition of some real improvements and additions in the masking tools and auto-synch feature (applying the same edits to many images automatically), Adobe have really brought Lightroom bang up to date, and as far as the HDR to DNG processing goes, have created something that no other software can, at the moment, compete with.
 
I really hope SONAR 2016 gives me the same 'buzz' as it continues to arrive in its monthly roll-outs.
 
 

44 years here, but I started young and now can't find "real" IT work mostly due to barely veiled age discrimination.  Oh well...