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

[peter]

The new sale price for a Sonar subscription is $79 for the first year for new customers only, that’s an increase of 40 percent, raised from $49 yesterday. The subscription then goes to its regular price of $179, formerly $149 per year, automatically renewed each year until cancelled.

Inflation, I guess?

I’m not feeling very confident that I’ll be able to open up by Cakewalk by Bandlab files in a free version of Sonar  the end of this year. Especially when Bandlab’s social media manager just posted in the Cakewalk subreddit: “…we can’t say for sure that these products will remain permanently free as things are subject to change in the bussiness [sic],” after being asked if the free Sonar version will stay around permanently or is just temporary.

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

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

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24

[dsteinschneider]

Well that reinforces your theory that in one to two years the product may not be available 🙂

I don’t have any skin in the game as I’m simultaneously using Mixbus 10, Reaper and Sonar. I’ve also pitched going over to Logic for the studio I’m involved with.

3

[lamia6]

Lowest price all year? LOL. Something tells me they flunked math class, also, not aware of the trades description act regarding false advertising.

CINZ NET Radio    |    Radio Registry

1

[peter]

All of us who have projects in Cakewalk by Bandlab have skin in the game.

For those who think that Bandlab is some kind of customer-friendly company owned by a kind, altruistic son of one the richest men in the world (his family is the richest family in Asia), consider this. Cakewalk Sonar’s development team — part of a company valued at $425 million — didn’t even consider accessibility for those with visual impairments in the design of Cakewalk Sonar. Additionally, while the company could have simply allowed Cakewalk by Bandlab to work for all who had projects created in it, they instead chose to make sure that no one could use it anymore and would be forced to Sonar — which again, has a design that didn’t consider the visially impaired, and also, the product doesn’t work for users of Windows prior to Windows 10. Our own Patrick shared that, as he uses Windows 7, his computer cannot install Sonar, and as Cakewalk by Bandlab will no longer activate after August of this year, the only way he can access the projects he’s made with CbB is to convert the project files for another DAW.

Bandlab could have considered people in Patrick’s situation. They could have considered visually impaired users in their development process. They could have easily not required CbB to not require their authorization process anymore and just let those who used it to create projects continue to use it, without further support. The whole thing speaks volumes of a company that doesn’t listen to or care about its users. As someone with hundreds of projects in the CbB and original Sonar project file formats, it does impact me. I do have skin in the game. I wish Bandlab were a more decent company. I won’t pretend that they are. I get it that there are a bunch of users who — like myself — have been using Cakewalk software from the early days, but that company doesn’t exist anymore. The fairytale of Meng being a great guy who loves to altruistically give away software to people because he’s simply such a nice person was ridiculous and defied logic. Yes, he built up great goodwill by giving away CbB free for several years, but he’s undone all of that goodwill and shown himself to be unconcerned with listening to the voice of the customer in the past year and has put those of us with a good deal of CbB and legacy Sonar project files into a bad situation.

Anyone who trusts this company at this point is making a mistake, IMO.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

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5

[SoulfulKeys]

And they pulled out a couple features from the free tier without warning, most notably for me is workspaces. I’ve started DAW shipping again because I’m not sure how long the free tier will be of any great use.

12

[joegyork]

It’s all deeply disappointing after the positive early days of Bandlab rescuing the software. To not consider the needs of disabled users in the 21st century is shocking! I’d read about the removal of workspace access on the Creative Sauce Cakewalk Facebook forum and I was shocked. I am hoping it is a mistake! They didn’t mention that in the release notes!

4

[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

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

14

[Brian]

I remember buying Greg Hendershott’s sequencer software decades ago when I am pretty sure he was a one man shop.  12 Tone Systems was the company name.  I don’t remember if he called it Cakewalk at first, but I do remember that it grew into “Cakewalk”.  Anyway-  Time keeps flowing, and products adapt or die (or are murdered after acquisition).  I only went back to Cakewalk for a few months a few years ago when I hit a hardware compatibility problem with Studio One (which they eventually fixed).

There are still a LOT of DAWS out there, and I think there is merit in using one that supports the DAW Project format.  This is a DAW agnostic project file spec. I have experimented with it, and while it is not drag and drop easy to convert projects,  it’s a whole lot easier way to get MIDI and audio tracks from one supported DAW to another instead of exporting/importing bits & pieces.  Currently I am only aware of support built in to Cubase, Studio One, and Bitwig.  I also think it speaks to the self-confidence of developers who support it.  Moss wrote his own free DAW Project converter tool for Reaper.  I had some old Reaper files that I would have liked to convert but it was hit and miss for me.

[peter]

On Brian said

I remember buying Greg Hendershott’s sequencer software decades ago when I am pretty sure he was a one man shop.  12 Tone Systems was the company name.  I don’t remember if he called it Cakewalk at first, but I do remember that it grew into “Cakewalk”.  Anyway-  Time keeps flowing, and products adapt or die (or are murdered after acquisition).  I only went back to Cakewalk for a few months a few years ago when I hit a hardware compatibility problem with Studio One (which they eventually fixed).

There are still a LOT of DAWS out there, and I think there is merit in using one that supports the DAW Project format.  This is a DAW agnostic project file spec. I have experimented with it, and while it is not drag and drop easy to convert projects,  it’s a whole lot easier way to get MIDI and audio tracks from one supported DAW to another instead of exporting/importing bits & pieces.  Currently I am only aware of support built in to Cubase, Studio One, and Bitwig.  I also think it speaks to the self-confidence of developers who support it.  Moss wrote his own free DAW Project converter tool for Reaper.  I had some old Reaper files that I would have liked to convert but it was hit and miss for me.

I wasn’t aware of the DAW Project. Thanks for sharing that Brian. It would be fantastic if all DAWs allowed users to save to a common format. Of course, most software developers wouldn’t go for it. But as a user, I would love it. I would , at this point, especially have appreciated it, as I wouldn’t have bothered to deal with Bandlab software again.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

[superabbit]

Not a popular opinion around here I guess, but I plan to continue to use Sonar until I can’t any more. However that may come about.

Won’t be investing in a BandLab membership. If they offer a perpetual license for Sonar, I might purchase one of those.

-Erik
___________
superabbit.bandcamp.com

1

[patrickwichrowski]

Yesterday I installed Cakewalk Sonar in my “potato” win 10 laptop. It imported all my CbB configurations and runs ok within in the limits of my laptop lack of CPU power hahahahaha

My critic: Everything became so so ugly in this new Cakewalk. All flat with no gradient, no sense of volume. 🙁

https://linktr.ee/patrickwichrowski/

https://patrickwichrowski.bandcamp.com/

2

[SoulfulKeys]

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.

3

[peter]

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.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

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2

[Author]

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