PSA: Waves is apparently discontinuing perpetual licenses

Do you expect them to update all their products forever for nothing? Fractal has really affected your perspective! Even Fractal stops supporting older products, at some point, they just keep them alive a long time.

I have 40-something Waves plugins, accumulated over many years, pretty much all bought on serious sale, and no desire to throw them away. This is the first cost I've had to pay since purchase, and I'm ok w it.

I update my DAW, Superior Drummer, and other stuff, at my discretion. If I was still a professional musician it'd be a cost of doing business.
 
Waves is just trying to slip in to a more predictable business model. The current license and WUP agreement allows users to utilize their plug-ins in perpetuity until they find it absolutely necessary to upgrade for compatibility, as someone mentioned. That’s not an easy model to forecast revenues, create budgets, plan the spend on development, etc.,
A subscription model is far more stable. It may take Waves a year or two to figure out their churn, subscriber acquisition costs, etc., but when they benchmark those, I imagine the company would be in better standing. If you’re heavily invested in Waves, you want them to remain in good standing. By this point, I’d imagine most of us have bought technology from a company that was unable to support it. My big loss was TC Helicon and their Powercore plug-in platform. I lost a few thousand on that. I’d hate to see Waves go under.

I didn’t see any of Waves subscription terms or rates but I don’t think I’d be opposed. I have a lot of Waves plugins that I never use. I doubt they’d offer their catalog ala carte. Waves sells bundles. I bought a few bundles not really knowing what was in them. I might benefit from a subscription model.

As for dogging on subscription models, I guess none of you use Spotify, Apple Music, Netflix, Amazon Prime, MS Office, a cell phone, cloud storage, Dropbox, an online newspaper…

PS: I can’t live without Vocal Rider.
 
Last edited:
AndyOrr said:
As for dogging on subscription models, I guess none of you use Spotify, Apple Music, Netflix, Amazon Prime, MS Office, a cell phone, cloud storage, Dropbox, an online newspaper…
Click to expand...
I avoid them as best I can and begrudgingly give in when there’s no other choice. Of the ones you name I have one and that’s Office. I may be dumping that when the year is up. I don’t consider a cell phone subscription. In fact I’m about to dump my free 6 months of Apple Music. The real factor is whether I feel I’m getting the value that I’m paying. I won’t use anything Adobe (except Acrobat which I use the free version) it sort of sucked losing Photoshop, but there are alternatives that are just as good. When it comes to music software it’s a definite NO! The whole “here it is free or low cost until we have you all hooked and put the competition out of business, then bam!!” 21st century business model is sinister and sucks. It appears this was a bad time economically for Waves to pull this stunt and for once in a long time the consumer got a win. Although, I’m interested to see what sort of prices they will start to want for individual plugins.

I’ve been noticing an odd paradoxical phenomena happening with those still of prime market targeting age. For as much as that group rails and railed against supposed Big Corporate sleaze baggery they seem to easily and readily just give in to it if they think it’s part of “their group” doing it. The irony is how they will want to cancel and make it impossible for those corporations to do business that actually do provide important life sustaining products and services that they take for granite while letting specific corporate tech, social tech, bogus “green” energy companies and worst of all their government commit fraud, deny and destroy their human rights, intrusively target with utter disregard for privacy and rip them off for huge money over time. It’s a strange and increasing dangerous world.
 
GitGuy513 said:
I don’t consider a cell phone subscription.
Click to expand...
You may not consider a cell phone as a subscription but that’s the exact term the cell phone industry uses to describe your business relationship with them. You’re a subscriber. When they talk about their business growth, it’s all about subscriptions. Same goes with cable TV, if that’s what you’re using instead of streaming. And if you have any relationships where the business calls you a “member”, you’re probably a subscriber.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262950/global-mobile-subscriptions-since-1993/

I agree, young people don’t know a world without myriad subscription relationships. Even Amazon promotes subscriptions to everything from kitchen sponges to condoms.

Back to music, United Audio is moving to a subscriber model. They introduced their Spark subscription service last year. Their new Volt interface lacks proprietary CPU - it won’t work with their Apollo coded plugs - and they’re now offering more native plug-ins. UA is just being a little more patient with the subscriber change-over process than Waves.
 
FYI, Waves has recanted its new policy and are offering both options now, they obviously were swayed by the user outcry……..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom