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

[Peter Woods]

On SoulfulKeys said

I like the new Sonar. I was able to use the full version being on the Beta team. The free tier is annoying and I’m concerned they’ll lock up more features without notice. I agree with Peter, there’s no way I can trust this company. The way they’ve introduced and rolled out the changes with Sonar has been abysmal. This raising of the price without notice comes across as extremely shady. I can understand not wanting to maintain CWBL but it’s a slap in the face to the people that have been loyal to CWBL and Bandlab. We’ll see what happens. They don’t really seem to care about the feedback.

As a strategist, looking at what BandLab is doing tells you a lot about the company, its culture, and its strategic vision. What is clear is that the company doesn’t really have a solid strategy for Sonar and they don’t value customer input. It’s an incredibly arrogant corporate culture. What is easily discernible is that Meng once believed that he could capture the former Cakewalk (the original company) customers. It’s a small customer base, and much older, largely Baby Boomers and Gen X. It’s a very different market, with a very different mindset than his BandLab target market, which is primarily Gen Z and Gen Alpha. BandLab has grown to what it claims is more than 100 million users of its namesake product, which is free, through using the freemium model.

Meng could have used the freemium model for Sonar and Next too. In fact, I think that he should have. Instead, it’s become very clear that he sees CbB and now Sonar as failing, because he expected them to have many more users. Even more, he expected those users to spend money in the BandLab ecosystem on loops, sample libraries, plugins, mastering, and distribution services. It’s clear that they didn’t. Consequently, Meng decided that he wants to derive revenue — as much as he can get — from Sonar. When Sonar sales didn’t hit their objectives, Meng decided to go back to offering a free version (the previous version being CbB — Sonar is, after all, really the same product as CbB with a facelift) and raising the subscription price.

At this point, I sense that the paid version of Sonar has less than 10,000 users — far less. There’s no good reason — strategically — for BandLab to have quietly raised the promo price of a Sonar subscription by 40% and the regular price by 20% when the product is failing to sell. It’s the equivalent of throwing up their hands and saying, “Screw it! We can’t get the volume of users we need, so let’s grab as much cash as we can from the user base to justify this product’s existence and pay the staff.” They clearly don’t see the freemium model as viable for Sonar; the free version is a kind of Band-Aid to not keep bleeding users. Again, I do. I think the problem there has been that BandLab isn’t very good at marketing to CbB and Sonar users. They use a sledgehammer instead of a piece of cheese. BandLab users are pitched a good deal of plugins, loops, mastering, and distribution services. That’s how BandLab makes its money. But the company hasn’t spent much time pitching even the mastering and distribution services to CbB and Sonar users. That’s a mistake.

The problem is that BandLab has made so many mistakes that they’ve created incredible distrust and resentment towards the BandLab and Cakewalk brands by CbB and Sonar users. That is a giant problem that is not easily fixed — it may not ever be fixed. Consequently, that makes Sonar’s path to any level of success extremely difficult. I don’t think that Meng has the patience to spend several years giving away a free version of Sonar to users that don’t spend in the BandLab ecosystem and his current strategies make it seem clear that his mindset is that the Sonar target market is only good for what they can spend on the DAW and not related products and services.

And that is a more detailed look at why I believe it’s clear that there are too many signs for Sonar to be a product that will be around 3 years from now.

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