Reply To: PreSonus Studio One Pro 7 – Perpetual License with 6-month Studio One Pro+ $99

[Peter DeLegge]

On Blacque Jacque Shellacque said

And we thought the Cakewalk/Sonar/Next launch was confusing! It seems there are not the only ones with bad marketing. 🙄 What is this world coming to! 😉

Strangely enough, I was thinking of going to Studio One since Sonar is subscription only (at least for now), but it feels like out of the frying pan into the fire!

My name is Jacques but you can call me Blacque Jacque Shellacque for short

At least PreSonus is listening to their customers, which is something BandLab has shown no interest in doing. I know that I’m not alone in having my personal data exposed by BandLab on more than a dozen occasions. Even worse, though Ashwin, BandLab’s social media guy promised to remove it from their site around a month ago, he never did and won’t respond to my requests. Of course, this is problematic, and depending on what state you live in, if BandLab exposed your private data on their site — and like with me, it’s still exposed and they refuse to remove it — they are violating various US state laws by refusing to remove this data. Frankly, what I’ve found is that BandLab doesn’t operate like most professional businesses with basic standards, and in this case, with complying with data privacy standards and laws.

But there are other reasons why I question if BandLab has a serious commitment to its DAW and even if its billionaire trust fund kid owner had the skillset to successfully make the business work (so far we just know he has a lot of his father’s money to buy companies).  It was obvious from day one that the strategy with giving away Cakewalk by Bandlab was to promote the company’s social media ecosystem and post-production and song distribution they were developing. That’s all well and good, but us DAW users of a certain age should keep in mind that we’re not the intended target market for BandLab. We’re legacy customers. A blip on their radar screen. We’re barely an afterthought.

Contrast that with PreSonus. Yes, PreSounus, like every other software company would love to go subscription only. The only thing stopping them are A LOT OF CUSTOMERS that they’re listening to. That’s one of several critical differences between PreSonus and BandLab. PreSounus is listening to their customers. Granted, their product marketing strategy is a mess, but I don’t think that reflects bad ethics, just incompetent marketing. PreSonus is clearly trying to capture more market share and meet customers where they’re at regarding perpetual licenses vs. subscriptions. Consequently, between PreSonus and BandLab, it’s an easy choice for me. I could easily foresee BandLab abandoning Sonar in the next few years if the product doesn’t meet sales goals.  I think this is a very risky time to go with BandLab. I think as long as PreSonus customers keep demanding perpetual licenses the company will offer them. BandLab obviously doesn’t respect its customers and doesn’t operate with great ethics.

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