Are you sure you're not overstating your case a little? I was working in the music business at that time, so I have no experience to say otherwise; but I find that assertion to be very surprising.
Maybe a little, but the specialty software at the core of other professions - engineering, science, accounting, finance, medicine, etc. - are, indeed, almost exclusively subscription-based and always have been.
Of course the businesses built around these professions also use Microsoft Windows and Office and a few other tools that are sometimes subscription and sometimes not (generally depending on the size of the company). But the software tied specifically to those professions - yes, almost always subscription. And vastly more expensive than what the music business uses.
Here's one example: let's say you're SpaceX. You run a tool called "Satellite Toolkit" (STK) from a company called AGI. A single-seat license for STK can easily be over $100,000 per year.
Here's another: let's say you're Ford. You run a computational physics tool called LS-DYNA to calculate how vehicle structures crumple when they hit something. A single-seat license for LS-DYNA can easily be $20,000 per year.
And the health care industry... Medical billing software is huge business because of the complicated mess we have (at least in the US) and is also many tens of thousands of dollars per year for a single license.
Now granted, the health care market is vastly larger than the music market (it's the largest single-market expenditure in the US by quite a lot) so you'd expect it to support such costs. But auto and satellite markets aren't *that* far off from the entertainment market, so they're a better comparison.
So, based on that comparison, $50,000 per year for a DAW seems reasonble, right? Well, let's hope not. But the point remains that specialty software for musicians is a *lot* less expensive than for other industries, subscription or otherwise.
The reason is that nobody is doing medical billing for fun, so the customer base is vastly different. More to the point, the customer bases have significantly different demands, particularly with regards to support. If you have a license for STK, you also have several people you can call up for help, usually within an hour or two. Not so much in the world of music software...!
rgames