Reply To: Bandlab Raises Price of Cakewalk Sonar Subscription to $179 Per Year

[peter]

Bandlab just censored my post informing people that the company just raised their subscription price for Sonar. My post was getting likes very quickly, so the Bandlab folks went for full on censorship — which is their MO. And from managing this area at large brands, and consulting to more than 200 companies over the years, it’s really rare to see a tech brand their size engaging in social media censorship of posts that aren’t blatantly troll posts (which mine never are). Here is my full post that Bandlab censored — no edits. It racked up 16 up votes in the time it was up — just over an hour, before Bandlab censored it:

“Bandlab just raised the price of an annual Bandlab subscription from $149 to $179.”

“Bandlab just quietly raised the price of an annual Sonar subscription from $149 to $179. For new customers, they raised the promo price for the first year from $49 to $79. Bandlab’s social media guy just posted here that they could kill the free version of Sonar at any time. The fact that they decided to stop everyone from being able to use Cakewalk by Bandlab anymore, even to acess their projects leaves those not using Windows 10 or later without any ability to open their project files… It’s all very concerning and destroys the goodwill Bandlab had built up. It just looks very greedy and anti-customer.

Why not just let people continue to use CbB instead of ensuring they can’t do so? I have hundreds of projects created in the original Sonar and CbB, but with everything Bandlab is doing, I think it would be foolish to continue using a Bandlab DAW. If they offered a perpetual license version of the free version of Sonar for $79 that they promised to never be deactivated, I would buy it, because at least I would have something that I could open my project files with 12 months from now (I wouldn’t continue using it to create new projects).

Of course, I have no problem with Bandlab looking to make a profit off of their products and services. But they’ve proven to be a company that doesn’t listen to or respect their customers. They’re floundering with the Sonar. It’s completely mismanaged. I don’t see any chance this DAW will be around two years from now. More likely it will probably be gone in a year. At this point, I think Bandlab has done so many things to alienate long-time users and create bad reputation for the Sonar brand, that I don’t see them turning things around.

It would be great to see Bandlab prove me wrong, but to this point, they’ve provided a case study in how to mismanage a software brand (Cakewalk). Again, I bet that in 2 yrs Next will still exist, but Bandlab has done far too much damage to Sonar; I can’t imagine how they could turn things around. CbB already had a very small share of the DAW market and I’m certain they blew that. I’d be surprised if Sonar has 25,000 Sonar paid subscribers, or even 10,000, considering the poor reputation they’ve earned. Publications—that Meng doesn’t own — rarely mention CbB or Sonar when mentioning DAWs. Add to that how Bandlab have alienated the former CbB user base in a major way, and it’s very difficult to see any path to Bandlab righting the ship.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Below my post, after I login:

“Locked post. New comments cannot be posted.”
“Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/Cakewalk.”

[EDIT: The one moderator that wasn’t a Bandlab employee — most of them are Bandlab employees — let me put the post back up, if it only referenced the 40% price increase for new subscriptions and the raising of regular price subscriptions from $149 to $179. It ended up getting the second highest amount of upvotes of all the threads on their subreddit and a number of people referenced my original post. There aren’t many Bandlab Sonar fans remaining posting anywhere in social media; consequently, I think that reflects the product not doing well. When I ran a sentiment analysis of all of the big music making forums, the various subreddits, and Facebook groups, DAW users feelings about Bandlab and Sonar is extremely negative. I don’t see a path for Bandlab salvaging the product at this point; they’ve mismanaged it and it’s caused a very negative brand image with their continuously ignoring and alienating customers and their insistence on going subscription-only. Cakewalk Sonar — what’s left of the user base — is probably, demographically, the oldest user base in the industry and Gen X and Boomers are very anti-subscription, and BandLab ignores that and instead treats them as if they think identically to Gen Z and Gen Alpha — that’s a very bad mistake. At this point, even if Bandlab offered a perpetual license for Sonar and promised that they would provide support for the free version for at least 5 years, I really don’t think that they would be able to grow Sonar’s market share to make it a successful product. Too much damage has been done to the brand with this market. Bandlab would be much better off buying a well established DAW with a loyal user base and doing their best not to alienate that user base.

If anyone couldn’t figure it out, this kind of analysis is what I do for a living. Music is my hobby.

https://www.bandlab.com/membership/get-membership?productAttribution=cw-cbb-offer

• This reply was modified 8 months, 3 weeks ago by peter.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

14