Reason Studios

Reason Studios

Basic information
Founded	1994
Type	Private
Industry	Creative Software
Official website	https://www.reasonstudios.com/

Reason Studios is a music production and performance software company based in Stockholm, Sweden. Best known for its flagship digital audio workstation, Reason, its prominence in digital music production rose decades ago with the groundbreaking ReBirth RB-338 synthesizer modelling and sequencing package. Musicians worldwide have invested their skills, workflow, and reliance in Reason's ecosystem for generations now.

Consumer impact summary

Propellerhead Software was acquired by private equity firm Verdane in 2017 and renamed to Reason Studios in mid-2019. After decades of sole adherence to a traditional perpetual-license and upgrade-pricing model, in January 2021 they introduced a subscription service. This is not unprecedented, and sometimes welcomed for price accessibility, but also widely resented as increasingly industry-standard practice for production software such as Adobe's Creative Cloud subscriptions. Reason does maintain availability of 'perpetual licenses' at this time, and their subscriptions do not employ contracts with early termination fees like Adobe's.

Incidents

Reason alters prior perpetual licenses (2023)

In May 2023, Reason Studios switched from a third party DRM provider (Codemeter by WIBU Systems) to an in-house solution, announcing the discontinuation of offline activation with no replacement for all versions up to 11.x released in 2020. Information that remains today about the transition fails to make it clear whether versions prior to 8.x can still be activated online at all, but offline activations do remain active either in continuous installations or reinstallable if you bought a Codemeter dongle and loaded your licenses before the cutoff date in Sept 2023. Aside from that, use cases (such as live performance) that make constant online connection unfeasible would require an upgrade. This move also infringes upon rights conferred in respective EULAs to sell and/or transfer the purchased licenses. The company at least briefly offered a 60% discount for upgrades as part of the transition.

Ongoing complications of a phone-home requirement

Reason Studios offers temporary one-year offline activations for their new products and services. But even those users who upgraded to 12.x+ and are unfamiliar with their DRM practices may be rudely surprised when they bring their computer to a live event intending to perform using the musical instrumentation they "bought", and are forced to find an Internet connection just to start the software, potentially damaging the event and/or their income.

Broader implications

Reason's DRM system keeping tight control of all assets, and investment profit motive driving itemization and continuous monetization of features, lines up with broader industry trends that make assumptions about usage patterns and environments that frequently conflict with traditional customer needs and expectations of a product "purchased" for "perpetual" use. Because these are software tools employed to create media, continued access to that media you created either eventually or continuously requires payment.

While it is understandable that the ongoing demands of software development necessitate a model that produces consistent income, there are several ways to accomplish that and some are more socially adaptive or customer-hostile than others. The relevant features include, among others:

• Subscription locks: Requiring recurring payments for access to basic device functionality.
• Cloud dependency: Rendering devices unusable without an active connection to company servers.

These practices collectively undermine consumer ownership and foster a landscape where corporations retain ongoing control over products long after sale.