cparmerlee
I think the difficulty people have is that past efforts at "club" type status resulted in a bunch of downloads that I had zero interest in.
But those were free, these are part of what you pay for and at least what I'm working on is custom content that is not available anywhere else. Much of it is proprietary material I use in my day-to-day work; I came up with it because I could not find what I needed elsewhere (e.g., hence the new amp sims).
I am interested in improvements to the core engine, not in having 100 downloaded add-ons that I will never use.
The updates will be a mix of additions to the core program AND content. I'm sure some content will be of no use to you and some will be of tremendous use. But that will be different for different people. Some of the things you might not use will be essential to others. By giving a well-rounded collection, hopefully everyone will feel they received enough for their own use to justify the cost. We can't expect everything to be relevant to everybody.
This initial launch does include a small number of improvements to the core product.
I wouldn't classify Mix Recall and VocalSync as "small improvements," especially when the closest you can come to VocalSync in the outside world will cost you almost twice the price of the update. The MIDI editing changes and AudioSnap improvements are significant, and the customized Control Bar is fantastic. The FX and Send stacks are really convenient. A lot of people said they didn't want more plug-ins and such, they wanted more improvements in core features and stability. So that's the focus for now, and add-ons like Drum Replacement will roll out over the next year.
"Membership" is asking people to buy a pig in a poke. I do think the Cakewalk / Gibson folks are well intentioned, so I might consider this, but this is a model I wouldn't consider from most companies, and I suspect it is going to be very damaging to Sonar's success in the market for that reason.
New users get 12 free months of membership so they have a year to experience whether it's worth it or not for them to renew. Current SONAR owners are aware of the type of updates CW produces over the course of a year, so there's some precedent. The biggest difference is there is additional original content to sweeten the deal above and beyond the updates.
Remember, the onus is not on users to renew. It's on Cakewalk to produce features and content that makes people
want to renew. The object of this model is not to see how little CW can get away with and still hold on to users, but to make happy customers - which is the only sure-fire way to be successful.