A few points I think some people here are missing on licensing fees that I’m pretty sure Roon understands well enough is that software like Roon, especially software that is in a constant state of flux and change, and has a tremendous amount of similar competition, much of it half the cost, the majority of it free of cost, is going to suffer a very high turnover of the customer base. Roon has some warts to it. And at it’s core, it’s nothing more than a media manager and audio player. Every computer already comes with one built in. Apple, the world’s wealthiest company, already supplies a pretty full featured one free of charge to even owners of competing computer OSes. Plus there’s all the open source alternatives. And smaller commercial software at much less cost such as Audirvana. Streaming customers get very full featured players from Tidal, Qobuz, or others for “free” (or included in their subscription, more accurately.) Roon IS expensive. It may not cost more than someone’s esoteric amplifier and phono cartridge, but compared to software that does the core functionality of it, it’s many orders of magnitude more expensive. It relies on doing the same thing, but better for differentiation.
A subscription costs more than a subscription to a year of Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal (basic), Qobuz (basic), or Spotify (when they run sales.) Think about that. For the same price or less you get access to most of the available music on Earth plus a pretty full featured music player software. Versus just getting a piece of player software and library manager.
Given that setup, and the rapid changes throughout the whole of the music industry, a lifetime license pays for about 4 years of subscription. The argument on pricing always comes down to the assumption that if you use Roon for 10 or 20 years you’re stealing money from them. But what about all the users who might subscribe for a year or two, hit some of the warts, realize they’re not seeing too much meaningful value out of it, and drop it. The lifers are worth 300%-400% the value of those users, and do not impact any metrics on active users negatively as those users would, which may be important for securing A) Investment, B) Partner interest from streaming and hardware companies. In SaaS, numbers matter even more than raw revenue. Not even just SaaS, these days. Spotify’s consistently lost money from day 1. So has Amazon’s retail unit. Never made a penny, either of them. Investors shove money into them like they’re running out of space to stack the 20s. Direct revenues are so 20th century. Now we track losses as a function of monopoly status and data acquisition opportunity!
Additionally there’s the percentage of users, such as myself, that, were there not a lifetime option and it were a fixed $120/yr sub, I would not have even gone beyond Roon’s front page before laughing and leaving. I’m a fan, and a customer, but the idea of $120/yr for life for player software wouldn’t be of interest to me. $500 once is very expensive for software, but I can rationalize that much better. There are no doubut many others who can bit their lip and pay out once like a piece of hardware, but may not wish to jump in on dedicating endless subscriptions on top of the subscriptions for streaming (that delivery substantially greater value for money.)
Atop that, subscription fatigue is becoming a real thing. BUSINESS loves subscription. Consumers are hitting a wall on it.
Finally, there is demographic. Who is Roon’s future market? Right now it may be 50+ males of an upper income bracket who can easily say “pssh, I spent more on my RCA connectors than this!” “Traditional audiophiles.” But where is it going to be in 10 years? In 20? That bunch isn’t getting younger, and milking endless subscriptions out of them forever won’t float the ship endlessly. Roon, to a degree has to decide if Roon is a product with a very small audience, like a high end speaker company, that will hope to milk that small demographic forever until the next set of similar people approaches retirement, or if Roon would rather try to go more mass market, as the “definitive” computer audio player for music lovers. I.E. is the future of Roon to be a software equivalent of Meridian or the software equivalent of JBL? There’s pros and cons either way, but that younger, larger, group isn’t going to favor renting a media manager that costs more than “all the music in the world” does. But one time buys can be made appetizing even to that group, and arguably if it grows much more prominent the cost could be knocked down heavily in the future. Roon itself probably doesn’t have an answer to that, and is likely just trying to be flexible to have the abilty to go whichever way the winds need them to go.
Roon is no doubt aware of all this, and factoring it into their decisions. Too many see a black and white “sustained income versus liability” when there’s a lot more that goes into how pricing is used to generate revenue in a model like this.
