The best way to make music is by spending $60 a month on bundles and services that will ultimately never be yours. Yep, in 2024, opening your DAW is easier when you open your wallet.
That’s what some software companies seemingly want you to believe, anyway. And, as more developers head down a subscription route, more music producers are feeling alienated.
Artists and producers aren’t strangers to subscription services. Splice, Tracklib, and Output have operated on a subscription basis since their inception, which most creators have warmly embraced. With these platforms, your cancel-anytime subscription guarantees a regular stream of new material to keep and use in your music — even if you end your subscription after downloading it.
READ MORE: VCV unveils VCV+ subscription plan – but it’s not rent-to-own, and fans are disappointed
And subscriptions are everywhere, anyway, right? Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, PlayStation Plus — even my HP home printer has an ink subscription option. It’s not a novel concept.
So why are music producers so frustrated that plugin companies are heading down the same path?
Last year, Waves, a long-beloved brand in studios around the globe, attempted to pivot to a subscription-only model. This move was seen as extreme by fans, who could no longer purchase Waves plugins outright; under this plan, they could not use them in their projects unless subscribed to Waves’ platform. It was seen as a paywall to creativity and an insult to long-standing customers who have always purchased plugin licenses and paid for regular upgrades.
Producers revolted and Waves overturned the decision in under 48 hours.
Much to many fans’ disappointment, modular synth software brand VCV Rack is the latest to offer a subscription service. It’s $29 monthly or $228 per year, and you get access to “VCV Rack Pro for DAWs; All premium VCV-brand modules; Official virtual Eurorack modules; and Hundreds of premium third-party modules.”
Thankfully, you can still purchase its stellar software, Rack 2 Pro, for $149 but, crucially, none of VCV’s customers were asking for such a service before launch. In fact, very few producers are ever asking for subscription plans to plugins.
A quick look at Native Instruments’ 360 service — which starts at $150per year and goes up to £440 per year — comes with a disclaimer: “All content offer details are subject to change without prior notice. Cancellation and downgrade effects depend on your subscription plan.”
In theory, this means that the software included in your subscription package could change without warning. Got a synth part in your project from Massive X? If NI were to remove that from your subscription, you could say goodbye to that sound. But if you own Massive X, the sound is yours forever.
Native Instruments has told us, however, that the note “allows us to introduce new features, products, or improvements, as well as to adjust the included features, such as online experiences. While products or features may be retired over time, we are committed to ensuring that users will not lose their sessions. In the event we end-of-life a product, subscribers will be provided with a way to maintain access and ensure continued compatibility with their work.”
Avid‘s Pro Tools, once the essential DAW for every major recording studio in the world, is now pushing producers to a sub model. You can buy a license from a reseller but, otherwise, it’s a monthly fee, with no rent-to-own option to allow you to eventually buy Pro Tools, even after paying $299 per year.
It’s easy to understand creators’ concerns. Our work is precious and deeply personal, if not to us then to someone we’re working with. Imagine your frustration if, after spending considerable time tweaking a plugin’s automation across a 5-minute track, adding movement and depth to your new masterpiece — only for it to be removed the next time you open the project. Or you miss a payment, leaving you without a DAW to even open. That’d suck.
You’ll rarely find anyone actively looking for a subscription to software they’ll never own. Adobe faced intense backlash in 2013 when it introduced Creative Cloud, marking an end to perpetual licenses of its software. If you want Photoshop in 2024, you need to pay $20 per month for as long as you use it — if you’re a photographer, that’s a lot of cash over the course of your career.
As Benn Jordan points out, with VCV+: “If you had to subscribe from [VCV Rack’s] initial 2017 release, VCV Rack would have cost you $2,436 and you wouldn’t own a single thing.”
If you had to subscribe from the initial 2017 release, VCV Rack would have costed you $2,436 and you wouldn’t own a single thing. pic.twitter.com/LlGPxHzvdp
— Benn Jordan (@bennjordan) September 7, 2024
But subscriptions aren’t all bad.
Services like Splice and Output seem to have it (mostly) nailed. And if you’re a casual music producer, or just want to try out a few NI products before buying them, for example, it’s a bargain; $11 per month for over 60 plugins is pretty good.
To that end, subscriptions aren’t a paywall to creativity, they’re lowering the barrier to creativity. There will be many young producers out there who are capable of being the next Timbaland, Brian Eno or Daft Punk — they should be provided with affordable tools to create and learn.
As companies continue to look to subscriptions as an option for their customers, we ask only the following: Consider a rent-to-own option whenever you can; don’t remove plugins abruptly without prior notice; be more realistic with your monthly subscription costs.
Our DAWs are much more fun when we know there isn’t a monthly payment of $100 required to keep the plugins open.
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