In my experience, I think it's an unfortunate reality that the plugin climate is such that sales are pretty much required. 10 years ago it was a different story. Waves was able to price a plugin at $300 and people paid that because there weren't many other options.
Then us little guys came along and were able to make the same and better quality without having to pay teams for marketing, legal and payroll and all that junk. All you really need is a computer and a web site, and lots of time. I don't need to sell $1,000,000 worth of plugins every month to stay in business. Because of that, we can price our plugins way lower and still do very well. The only way waves can keep up with that is by putting there stuff on sale.
The problem is, and this is the part that drives me nuts, lower priced plugins don't sell. It doesn't really matter what our ideals are, people look to the MSRP to determine the quality of a plugin. If I could, I'd price all my plugins at $10 and sell 50,000 copies of each plugin. But it just doesn't work that way. When people see a low price tag, they instinctively thing "cheap plugin."
In a world where everybody wants to blame their gear for their lack of quality recordings, people will always question your plugins if the price is low. If someone is mixing a song and it's not coming out the way they expect it to, the first thing they are going to do is start pointing the finger at their gear, and if your plugins are cheap, you are first in line to catch the blame.
I doubt anyone buys any waves plugins at full price. Those full prices are there only to prime the sales. The only way to compete with that is to play along with that game, or completely disrupt the market. Slate got a head start on that one with the subscription thing, and it's working out very well for him, and now he's in the position to create the rules of the subscription game.
I've tried the $10 plugin thing. You get a small core group of people that will pay $10 for a plugin because they know your quality based on past products, but it won't get new customers. The same plugin that is $50 but on sale for $10 will sell way more. It's dumb, but it's true. I make more off of a $50 plugin being on sale for 1 day than I make off a $10 plugin in 2 months. It's hard to stick with ideals when reality tells you otherwise.
|