It's a transitional stage from perpetual licenses to subscriptions.

Source?

Maybe or maybe not. I would say in general most of us here are not fans of subscription services. Those of use who have sold software and tried subscription services are very aware of the hate received by many of those paying for the subscriptions. I assure you that Ableton management is extremely aware of the general unfavorable opinion users have of subscription software. This rent-to-own model is an attempt to provide a quality product to as many users as possible and still manage to operate a going concern. Almost no one gets into the creative software space with the intention of gouging their users. There are much better outlets for people with those intentions.

Now, if Ableton ends up being acquired by a private equity firm, you may very well see a shift in their pricing model where extracting revenue from customers at the expense of product quality becomes primary.

If you have worked with any of the people currently, or formerly, running Ableton, you will know that they worked hard to regain their financial independence from their outside investors and I doubt becoming a predatory software subscription service is on their roadmap.

It also wouldn’t work because I can just keep using the current version indefinitely.

There is very little reason to upgrade to the latest versions IMO

Substance was also really cool company with the same model and Adobe bought them out.

I used Ableton 9 for many years before upgrading to 12.

The model just works because you don’t need to upgrade constantly, it’s nothing like a subscription.

I only upgraded to get the Apple Silicon version for my newer Mac. I'm sure I'll be on 12 for quite a while.

I did a double take when I first saw that a few months ago. You can pause and pick it up again and keep your progress towards full ownership. So nice, extremely consumer friendly.

How much different is ableton live vs ableton live lite? I get the latter free with my audio interface, not sure if terms are changing with 13 but they let me get version 12 with my 10 year old focusrite.

I think the biggest thing is a track limit (8?), but I'm sure there's other things. Max4live, etc.

Extremely different. Lite has track limit (8) and is missing EQ8 - the stock multiband equaliser, among other things.

Ableton makes this extremely clear in:

https://www.ableton.com/en/live/compare-editions/

go through it and you'll see that Standard is the least you'd want, and Suite is a great deal.

three main version are Lite, Standard and Suite. Lite is pretty decent and almost has everything that Standard has except limits you to 8 tracks, Suite is where the real magic is though with Max4Live and such.

I really think its a decent model, one really doesn't usually need the latest and greatest version of Ableton to do most things and the rent to own option give broke artist a way to get into the software while the developers still get paid.