I was just about to go and buy a new copy of Adobe Photoshop and as I always do I scanned the internet for the best price, the cost varied widely with the lowest being £329 and the highest over £1000. Then I went to Adobe to check the features and saw an advert offering me both Photoshop and Lightroom for around £8 per month, 30 days to cancel on a 12 month rolling contract. I thought this must be a mistake, it must be a version with limited features, but no, what it is as far as I can tell is pretty awesome.

It’s a paradigm shift from the old buy the product, own it (you never did, you licensed it, but who is splitting hairs?), you then wait for it to devalue and then get stung when a new version is released with a costly upgrade fee. I think it’s a smart idea and I think people would be less likely to be tempted to pirate software only costing £8 a month than several hundred or thousands of pounds.

Even better the cloud app gives you all you need in one place.

It got me thinking, what if Avid did the same thing and offered Pro Tools on a monthly plan, as well as what you could see below, just imagine… Pro Tools, plug-ins, storage and a place to showcase your work all in one place, Adobe have done it - which DAW will be first to go this way, perhaps one of them already offers this? I for one hope there’s a Pro Tools monthly plan in the future. I hope this is part of the Avid Everywhere strategy, if so it could be very good for all of us.

So take our poll, would you rent Pro Tools on a monthly plan if you were not penalised in any way?

<a href="http://polldaddy.com/poll/7618823/">Would You Rent Pro Tools On A Monthly Plan If The Cost Did Not Penalise You?</a>

This is how Adobe do it:

Install

Buy Plug-ins

Store your work

Show and sell your content