"SaaS is dead." The music industry actually already lived this. And here's what's coming
Every day someone posts "SaaS is dead": it's not.
The music industry ran this exact experiment from 2000 to today. Same democratization, same collapse of the middle, and same shift from craft to attention. SaaS is running the same playbook (just compressed).
Here's my 4-phase map. I think we're somewhere between 2 and 3.
Phase 1, Anyone can build it now Music: 1999–2005. SaaS: 2022–2025.
Music got Pro Tools, Logic, GarageBand. Studio-quality from a bedroom. SaaS got Lovable, Claude Code, Codex. Production apps in a weekend.
We all see the supply explosion. And the first wave of democratized creators out-quality the incumbents. Bedroom producers were better than mid-tier label artists by 2008. Solo founders are already shipping better products than 50-person SaaS teams.
The incumbents' moat was never talent, it was access to tools. And that moat is gone.
Phase 2, Anyone can distribute it now Music: 2005-2012. SaaS: 2025-2026.
Music: MySpace, iTunes, then Spotify. Global reach without a label. SaaS: you no longer need a sales team, channel partners. You launch on the socials and you're in front of a global audience the same day.
Gatekeepers lose pricing power. But this kills the middle and poisons the giants**.** Mid-tier labels died fast. But the majors, like Universal, Sony, Warner just decayed slower, lost the cultural relevance first, the pricing power second, the talent pipeline third.
Same thing is coming for Salesforce, HubSpot, the big "commercial" suites. They won't disappear. They'll just become uncool, then unloved, then unrenewed. The smart kid building today is not dreaming of becoming the next Salesforce. They're building the tool that makes Salesforce feel like a fax machine.
Phase 3, Anyone can build, anyone can distribute, so now what? Music: 2012-2018. SaaS: 2026-2028.
When supply explodes and distribution is free, the bottleneck moves to attention. Everyone says this. But then they say "so you need to focus on distribution" like that's a tactic. It's not a tactic. It's a job change.
Look at who won in music. It wasn't the artists who made the best records and "also did some marketing." It was the artists who became content creators first, musicians second. The job stopped being "make great music." The job became "make great content, which contains music."
The music is the merch now. The artist is the brand. The brand lives on social.
The 2026 founder isn't a coder who "also does marketing." The 2026 founder is a creator who happens to ship software. The time you used to spend writing code now goes into shooting videos, writing threads, posting, building email lists, doing podcasts, showing up in comments. It's a fundamentally different job.
If you're a founder who hates being on camera, hates writing publicly, hates building an audience, you're in the same position as a singer in 2018 who refused to make TikToks. The skill that used to be the whole game is now table stakes.
This is also why VCs are shifting. They're not funding products anymore. They're funding founders with distribution. Audience-market fit comes before product-market fit. That sounds like a hot take. It's already the reality if you look at who's getting funded in 2025–2026.
Phase 4, The bifurcation Music: 2018-present.
Music split into 2 economies:
- (a) global mega-artists who win the algorithm
- (b) niche creators with deep direct-to-fan relationships
The mid-tier "signed to a label, modest career" path is dead.
SaaS goes the same way. Either you're a platform at scale, or you're a hyper-niche vertical tool with a real direct relationship to a defined audience. Horizontal generic productivity SaaS for SMBs, that's the dying middle.
Just like in music, not everyone gets to be a creator anymore.
When the tools democratized music, the dream was "everyone can be a musician now." The reality was: a small percentage built real careers, a larger percentage made beer money, and the vast majority made nothing and quit. The democratization of the tools didn't democratize the outcomes. It just removed the excuse.
SaaS is heading exactly there. Yes, anyone can build a SaaS in a weekend now. No, that does not mean everyone who builds one will have a business. The "everyone's a founder" wave is going to break the same way "everyone's a musician" broke. Most projects will be hobbies. A real percentage will quietly die. The ones that survive will look much more like creators with a product than coders with a startup.
It's just what happens when supply expands faster than demand and attention stays finite.
Now, where this is coming from
Honestly? I'm writing this because I'm living it. Spent the last 3 months building an AI-native event ticketing platform (sayevent). Just launched and I'm hitting Phase 3 in the face, I'm realizing the hard part isn't behind me, it's in front of me. Getting the first organizers is brutal. The code was the easy part. Everything after is a different job I'm learning.
And if any of you have been through Phase 3 yourself and have a playbook, I'm all ears in the comments.
That's my take. We'll see if I called it right. Happy to be wrong publicly!