How to Sell Your Audio Plugins w/ Tobias Madsen (Moonbase) | Ep 35

Three Things You Can Take Away From This Episode

• Audio software sits between digital and physical e-commerce: customers shop on feel and taste, so you need carts, upsells and loyalty pricing, not just a single checkout.
• The smoother the path from install to first use, the better – one-click activation beats copying keys every time.
• Your licensing, store and customer data are worth more when they live in one system, because that’s what makes targeted marketing possible.

Tobias Madsen never set out to work in audio. About ten years ago, his friend and housemate Benedict, founder of Yum Audio, asked him to build a website for some plugins. Like most “small” software projects, it grew. First they needed licensing, then copy protection, then e-commerce, then a way to scale all of it together.

After running those systems for Yum Audio and Black Salt Audio for four or five years, Tobias took the best ideas from both and built Moonbase, now a sales, licensing and customer platform used by a large share of the audio software industry.

In this conversation, Tobias and Josh cover what makes selling plugins different from selling other software, how Moonbase fits into any website, and where he sees plugin marketing heading.

1. Pay for What Brings in Revenue

When Yum Audio went looking for a licensing provider, two requirements ruled out most of the options. They had a wide product line rather than one or two flagships, and they wanted to give away freebies.

Most off-the-shelf providers charged per product or per license, which never made sense to Tobias. More products don’t mean more revenue, and a free plugin shouldn’t cost you money. So they built their own, and Moonbase still prices strictly on usage today.

He’s also honest about what building it yourself really involves. It isn’t just C++. You need cryptography, web, APIs and the full cycle in between, which is overkill for most plugin companies.

2. Plugins Are Bought on Feel, Not Function

Most digital e-commerce is built for productivity tools, where one person buys one product in a single checkout. Tobias sees audio software as something in between. It’s digital, but customers shop by taste and impressions, much like fashion.

That calls for carts, offers, upsells and upgrades, and above all a way to reward the fans who keep coming back. One of Yum Audio’s first ideas was to give existing customers a discount on a new launch based on how many plugins they already owned.

Payment providers that don’t know your customers or your licensing make that surprisingly hard. At one point, the workaround of generating personalised coupon codes on the fly produced so many coupons that it broke FastSpring’s interface.

3. Make Activation a Single Click

Early on, every plugin had an email and password field. Password managers didn’t work well inside plugins, people mistyped, and handling validation in a JUCE UI was fiddly.

So they simplified it. Now the plugin opens the website, where most customers are already logged in, and activates immediately. If they aren’t logged in, they can start a trial or buy a licence right there. There are no codes to copy and no waiting for keys.

Tobias thinks it may be the nicest activation experience out there. It’s hard for other providers to copy because it depends on controlling authentication on the website, not just running a key server.

4. Let Developers Build Their Sites However They Like

Moonbase started with a Vue.js SDK on top of its APIs. But audio developers use everything from WordPress and Squarespace to Framer, Webflow and AI-built custom sites, so the team built an embedded storefront. A single script adds pre-made carts, checkout, login, licence management and activation to any website.

Tobias’s view is simple: audio developers are creative, so let them use whatever tools make them most productive. More advanced teams can go fully custom with the APIs and white-label everything, and some use Moonbase’s customer authentication to power their own user areas.

Josh shares TAP’s own experience of integrating Moonbase on Webflow sites alongside the JUCE module, and describes it as seamless.

5. Don’t Forget Merchant of Record

The first question every digital seller should ask is who handles their taxes. Shopify doesn’t act as merchant of record out of the box, so you need a separate service, which gets complicated and expensive quickly.

Shopify is also built for physical goods. Tobias says people who move from Shopify to Moonbase can often uninstall ten or so paid apps they were using to cover delivery, licensing, user accounts and more. His case for Moonbase comes down to one joined-up system and licensing that’s been properly thought through in production.

6. Find Your Audience, Then Grow Into Email

Tobias won’t pretend there’s one marketing formula, because what worked five years ago doesn’t now. He’s been struck by a younger generation of audio developers who speak the language of TikTok and Instagram and do very well by finding their audience there.

The universal answer is to find your people and tell a story that drives visitors and sales. As a company grows, its voice usually becomes more professional and more newsletter-led, and that’s when data matters most.

With licensing, store and customer data in one place, you can send far more relevant emails, such as offers to people who own one product but not another, or reminders to people who haven’t installed the latest version. At the time of recording, in-house marketing tools with that kind of segmentation and unique coupon codes were a major focus on Moonbase’s roadmap.

7. The JUCE Module Does More Than Licensing

The Moonbase JUCE module began as a simple activation flow. It now includes pre-made UIs for trials, deactivation and offline activation, plus a few extras.

Update notifications show a small bubble in the plugin when a new version is available, with a one-click download. Optional telemetry reports which DAWs and systems your plugin is running on, which helps developers decide where to focus testing and ads. Moonbase can also host your installers at no extra cost, so they appear in the customer’s account and feed the update checks.

8. No AI for AI’s Sake

Asked about AI features, Tobias is sceptical of adding them just to have them. He notes that a major retailer reported poor conversion from checkout inside ChatGPT, and he thinks customers still want to buy from sources they trust.

For a plugin company with ten or twenty products, he argues you don’t need Shopify-style catalogue tools. A creative website with clear messaging does more, and if AI tools need product data, a simple static file can supply it.

Closing

What ties Tobias’s approach together is the idea that customers should experience one business, not three systems taped together. Licensing, the store, accounts and marketing all work better when they share the same picture of the customer.

Moonbase’s roadmap and changelog are public at moonbase.sh, where you can vote on features or book a call with Tobias to talk through your setup. For audio developers who can build a great plugin but feel lost on the selling side, it’s a practical look at the infrastructure behind a plugin business.

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