The email hits your inbox on a Tuesday morning. Payment failed. Your subscription is about to lapse. You’ve got 30 days to update your credit card or lose access.
Not access to new plugins. Not access to updates. Access to your own fucking work.
That mix you did in 2019? The one the client still plays at conferences? It’s got four plugins from this company baked into the master bus. Stop paying, and that session opens with holes in it. Silent spots where the compressor used to be. A reverb that’s now just empty space. Your work, held ransom.
This is where we are now. And it happened so gradually that most people didn’t notice until they were in too deep to get out.
The Lie of Ownership
Look, I don’t remember when I bought my first software synth. Could’ve been ‘98, could’ve been 2001. What I do remember is that it came on a CD-ROM, I installed it, and it worked.
Does it still work? Probably not. The 32-bit to 64-bit transition killed half the plugins I owned. Apple’s been playing musical chairs with operating systems for two decades. Maybe I could’ve updated some of them. Maybe I did and they’re still sitting there in a folder somewhere.
The point is, if I needed to open those old sessions now, it would be a fucking archaeological dig. And I have done that. I bought Cakewalk Sonar back when it was Cakewalk 1 for DOS. Yeah, I’m that old. I’ve still got .wrk projects from 1990 sitting on a hard drive.
Do they work? Sort of. Gibson bought the company in 2013, shut it down in 2017. Just killed it. Everybody who’d been using it for years got fucked. BandLab picked up the pieces later and made it free, which saved some people’s asses, but that was charity. You can’t plan around charity.
Or how about GigaSampler? Remember that? Revolutionary when it came out. Streaming samples from disk instead of loading everything into RAM. Changed how people worked with sample libraries. I used it for years.
Then Tascam bought GigaStudio, ran it into the ground, and killed it in 2008. All those .gig libraries? Dead format. You can convert some of them if you want to spend days doing it and hope the conversions don’t fuck up the keyswitches and velocity layers. Most people just moved on and lost access to thousands of dollars worth of sample libraries.
The samples still exist on your hard drive. The software to play them doesn’t. That’s the difference between owning something and licensing access to it.
Finale: A Masterclass in Planned Obsolescence
Here’s another one. Finale. I owned Finale 1.0 for Windows back in 1989 or so. I know that software like the back of my hand. Twenty-five years of muscle memory. Twenty-five years of scores and arrangements and charts.
It still works. For now.
But Apple’s going to break it with the next OS update. Windows 12 will probably kill it too. And MakeMusic already announced they’re discontinuing it entirely. After 35 years, they’re just done. No more updates. No more support. Good luck.
So now what? All those Finale files. Decades of work. They open now, but for how long? And even if I wanted to move to Dorico or Sibelius, the import process is a nightmare. Formatting breaks. Articulations don’t translate. It’s not a migration, it’s a rebuild.
This is what happens when your data is locked in proprietary formats controlled by a single company. When that company decides you’re not profitable anymore, your work becomes a museum piece.
You want to avoid this? Use open-source software. Or at least open-source formats. Something that doesn’t require a company to stay in business for you to access your own shit.
Remember when MP3 was a licensed format? Software developers had to pay Fraunhofer for every copy they sold. That cost got passed to you. Then the patents expired in 2017, and suddenly MP3 was free. But for 20 years, you were paying a tax on a codec because someone owned the math.
That’s the game. They own the format, they own your work. And when they’re done with it, so are you.
Waves: The Blueprint for Extortion
Here’s how it works. You buy a Waves plugin in 2015. Pay $200, maybe $300. It’s yours, right? Says so right on the site. “Buy now.”
Works great for three years. Then you get the notice: your version is now “unsupported.”
Unsupported doesn’t mean broken. Means Waves isn’t updating it anymore. Means the next time Apple or Microsoft changes something in the OS, your $300 plugin might stop working. Might not. But Waves isn’t fixing it if it does.
Want the supported version? That’s $240. For software you already bought. And not just once. Every fucking year, there’s a new version, and your old version slides into “unsupported” status like clockwork.
This isn’t a bug. It’s the business model.
But wait, there’s more. Your Waves licenses live on a USB dongle or are tied to a specific computer. That dongle dies? That computer craps out? You’re fucked. Now you get to contact Waves customer support and beg them to “allow” you access to the software you already paid for.
And here’s the best part: they’ll likely tell you to buy a second license. Not replace the one you own. Buy another one. Because the license you purchased apparently came with the condition that it only works as long as the physical hardware it’s tied to doesn’t fail.
Hardware fails. That’s what hardware does. But Waves built a business model around treating hardware failure as a reason to charge you again.
I watched them do this to people for a decade before the backlash got loud enough that they had to walk some of it back. But the damage was done. They proved you could sell someone software and then charge them again for the privilege of continuing to use it. Every other company took notes.
Now it’s subscriptions all the way down, and at least that’s honest. You’re not buying shit. You’re renting until you can’t afford to rent anymore.
Your Back Catalog Is a Ticking Time Bomb
Used to be, your old projects were an asset. A catalog you could revisit, remix, repurpose. I’ve got 2-inch master tapes from the eighties that still play. Scratchy, sure. But they play.
Your 2019 Pro Tools session? That’s not an asset. That’s a liability spreadsheet.
Open it up. Count how many third-party plugins are in there. Now count how many of those companies you’re still paying. Now imagine you stop paying. What happens?
You get a session that opens with errors. Missing plugins. Silent channels. Effects that don’t exist anymore because you’re not subscribed. And sure, you can replace them. Find alternatives. Rebuild the chain. But it’s not the same session anymore, is it? It’s archaeology. You’re reconstructing something that used to work perfectly fine until you stopped feeding the meter.
Multiply that across 200 sessions. Ten years of work. Every project a minefield of potential missing pieces.
This is the deal now. Your catalog isn’t yours. It’s a dependency chain, and every link costs money forever.
When the Company Dies, Your Work Dies With It
And all of this assumes the companies stay in business. That the authentication servers stay online. That nobody decides your product line isn’t profitable enough to maintain.
I’ve seen companies go under. Seen them get acquired and gutted. Seen product lines abandoned mid-cycle because the new owner didn’t give a shit about legacy users.
Your software doesn’t have a warranty. It has a lifespan, and that lifespan is tied to the financial health of a company you don’t control and can’t predict.
iLok is the perfect example. Thousands of plugins. Hundreds of companies. All using the same third-party DRM system. If iLok has a bad quarter, if they get bought by the wrong company, if they just decide the music software business isn’t worth it anymore, what happens?
You’ve got a hard drive full of sessions you can’t open. Plugins you paid for that won’t authorize. No offline verification that lasts. No physical backup. Just faith that a DRM company you’ve never met stays solvent and continues to give a shit about musicians.
I bought an Alesis ADAT in 1993. The company went bankrupt in 2001. The ADAT still records. Still plays back. Still syncs with the other two I’ve got in the rack.
Try that with a plugin that requires server authentication.
The Fantasy You’re Paying For
And here’s the thing that pisses me off most: You’re not even using half this shit.
You’ve got a subscription to Slate Everything Bundle or Plugin Alliance or whatever. Forty-seven compressor plugins. You use two. One’s the stock Pro Tools compressor. The other is some 1176 emulation you’ve had forever and actually understand.
But you keep paying $30 a month because what if you need that obscure British console emulation? What if there’s a session where only that one specific plate reverb will work?
You won’t. There won’t be.
This is Gear Acquisition Syndrome with a monthly billing cycle. The same brain chemistry that makes you buy another guitar you don’t need, except now it’s frictionless. Just keeps charging your card. You don’t even feel it until you look at your statement and realize you’ve paid $2,000 this year for plugins you opened twice.
Meanwhile, the compressor and EQ that came with your DAW? They’re fine. Maybe even good. Engineers made hit records with stock Logic plugins twenty years ago. Radiohead made Kid A with stock software. But we’ve been sold this idea that we need boutique emulations of hardware we’ve never touched to make records that sound like records made with gear we’ve never used.
It’s a con. A subscription con. And it works because we’re musicians, and musicians are suckers for the promise that the right tool will unlock something we don’t have yet.
You’re Building on Sand
So what do you do?
You keep paying. Because you’re in too deep. Because your templates are built around these tools. Because your muscle memory knows these interfaces. Because going back and rebuilding everything with stock plugins or one-time purchases sounds like archaeological work you don’t have time for.
Or you accept that your catalog has an expiration date. That at some point, you’ll stop paying, or the company will stop existing, and all those sessions will become historical artifacts instead of working projects.
There’s no good answer here. The industry moved from selling tools to selling access, and they did it because access is more profitable. You pay forever or you lose everything. That’s the deal.
I’ve got hardware from the eighties and nineties that still works. Powers on. Does exactly what it did when I bought it.
I’ve got software from five years ago that won’t open without errors.
That’s where we are. And it’s not getting better.