Waves Reinstates Perpetual Licenses And The Waves Upgrade Program

The beginning of the week saw plugin developer Waves Audio instituting a new subscription model called Creative Access and canceling all previous programs. That meant that if you previously purchased a Waves plugin, it would still work, but you could no longer update it unless you migrated to the subscription model. The backlash was fast and fierce and Waves yesterday issued a statement that they were again reinstating both perpetual licenses and the Waves Upgrade Program (WUP).

Why Developers Like Subscriptions

The Creative Access subscription was divided into two tiers – Waves Essentials at $14.99 per month, and Waves Ultimate at $24.99 per month. A subscription to Essentials would get you access to 110 plugins along with all the updates. Ultimate would allow access to 220 plugins plus all updates. Both provided access to the new StudioVerse AI-powered preset-sharing community.

You can’t blame waves for wanting to transition to subscriptions. As you could imagine, developers hate having to be in sales mode all the time. Every month there’s a new sale, and the only way you can keep a company healthy is for those sales to be successful. However it’s expensive and stressful, and consumers aren’t too happy with the model either, as they’re constantly bombarded with sales emails.

Subscriptions provide a path for steady income without having to charge customers for upgrades, which everyone also hates. In truth, Creative Access is a good deal and might ultimately be cheaper than the current sales model that Waves uses.

I think the big problem with this transition was that there was no warning given to customers that it was coming. You checked your email on Sunday morning and discovered that there was the surprise announcement that most customers interpreted as strong-arming. Also, many felt (unjustly) that the plugins that they already purchased wouldn’t work.

That was never the case, but the fact of the matter is that if you later upgraded to a new system version there was a good chance that the plugs would no longer work at that point. All you had to do was look at the posts on social media to know that many long-time customers were ready to wash their hands of the company and walk away.

With the announcement by Waves CTO and Co-founder Meir Shashoua that perpetual licenses and WUP would stand side-by-side with Creative Access subscriptions (something that competitor Plugin Alliance has been doing for some time), it appears that the company is listening and is willing to take quick action to their customers needs. Will this action come too late?

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