Is There Hope in the Music Tech Industry? AI, Independent Devs, and What's Next

[diegorcortega]

Hey KVR community,

I recently published a piece on this topic and wanted to bring it here — honestly, there's no better place to have this conversation than with people who live and breathe this stuff.

The short version of my take:

The music tech industry has real problems — market consolidation, subscription fatigue, bloated installers, and a handful of companies controlling too much of the ecosystem. When competition shrinks, innovation slows, and we all feel it.

But I'm genuinely optimistic, and here's why:

AI is leveling the playing field. Tasks that once required large engineering teams can now be tackled by solo developers or small studios. DSP knowledge still matters — but the barrier to entry is lower than it's ever been.

Independent developers are filling the gaps. I experienced this firsthand: I built a free vocal rider plugin in early 2025 that hit 15,000+ downloads. That told me something important — producers are hungry for tools that solve real problems, and they don't care if it comes from a big brand or a solo dev.

Accessibility is winning. Free and affordable plugins are thriving precisely because the major players have pushed users away with expensive licensing and bloatware.

I came to audio software development from an unusual path — guitarist, music production engineering student, then programmer across multiple industries — and returning to build VST plugins felt like the industry was finally ready for more voices.

Would love to hear the community's perspective:

Do you think consolidation is killing innovation, or is the indie scene strong enough to counter it?
How are you using AI tools in your own development or production workflow?

Full blog post here: https://casaoccidente.com/blogs/news/is ... h-industry

[Shane Sanders]

We are at an unusual point in the history of music and technology. For a long time, the person who could build the machine had an obvious advantage over the person who merely knew what the machine ought to do. But A.I. is beginning to invert that relationship. Fluent coding still matters, of course, but it is no longer the only gatekeeping skill. Increasingly, the more valuable person may be the one who can recognize what a musical tool, workflow, interface, sound, or experience ought to become, and how another human being might encounter it with pleasure, clarity, and creative momentum.

This is especially true in the music industry, where technical possibility has already outrun ordinary usefulness. A.I. can generate melodies, beats, lyrics, mixes, stems, presets, variations, and entire songs. The bottleneck is no longer merely production. The bottleneck is taste. Someone still has to know what feels cheap, what feels alive, what feels emotionally true, what serves the artist, and what merely dazzles for five seconds before becoming irritating. In that world, aesthetic discernment becomes a serious form of intelligence. It is not just decoration layered on top of technology. It is the faculty that decides whether technology becomes an instrument or a gimmick.

That kind of discernment is mysterious. It is partly learned through years of listening, failing, comparing, refining, and noticing what actually moves people. It may also be partly innate, bound up with personality, temperament, sensitivity, patience, curiosity, and the ability to perceive subtle differences. And beyond that, it is shaped by the whole hidden architecture of a person’s life: childhood associations, reward systems, memory, culture, trauma, confidence, attention span, even bodily conditions like sleep, nutrition, and nervous-system health. Taste is not floating in some abstract cloud. It lives in the body, the biography, and the trained imagination.

So the future of music technology may not belong simply to those who can make the most powerful tools. It may belong to those who can humanize them. The essential question will not be, “Can A.I. make this?” Very often, it can. The better question will be, “Should this exist in this form, and will it help someone make or experience music more deeply?” In that sense, the old artistic virtues are becoming newly practical: taste, restraint, emotional intelligence, patience, structure, beauty, play, and judgment. The machine can produce endless options. The human being must still know what is worth choosing.

[diegorcortega]

Thank you for responding, Shane,

Your insights are very deep and hit precisely on some of the most interesting angles of A.I., its inability to replace human essence and the intricacies of creating art that cannot be removed by machines. In that sense, humans are safe from A.I. replacement, and as you said, the old artistic virtues are becoming the defining element in creation, not just in art but in many other areas that require human discernment and criteria.

On the other hand, there are issues in the music tech industry that precede A.I., namely the concentration of market shares into single companies, which has been happening long before A.I., and whose most recent example is the purchase of Native Instruments, Brainworx and Plugin Alliance by InMusic, which will most probably have negative effects. Lack of competition results in a lack of innovation and price surges. Those are two very big issues:

Lack of innovation produces companies that gatekeep technology. In contrast, the web development industry is a highly competitive space that ends up opening its technology in the form of frameworks and tools for the public, which in turn get communities that collaborate and invest in such tech in order to be able to use it for their own purposes and keep the innovation going. In return, those companies that open up get a supportive community that will iterate and improve their tech free of charge, in sum, benefiting the companies, those who support the open tech, and the final users of such tech.

The price surges reduce opportunities for those who don't have the money to buy plugins, DAWs and music tech overall. The lack of access to the tools reduces the pool of people that can develop a taste for those ones that can afford it. This is somewhat unfair and a source of discontent for music producers, who get limited and cannot really have the chance to go beyond a few affordable or free options.

On the brighter side, the democratization of music tech that's happening with the help of A.I. will probably produce a lot of tech & music that, although it may not hold to the highest standards, is okay, I believe, because it'll give a chance to many bedroom producers and indie developers like myself to try and test many ideas & options until they find the ones that are best for them and, as a result, more people will be able to develop taste and have the chance to create great music and music tech.

What I can say for myself is that I'm proud of the plugins I've made with the assistance of A.I.; these plugins have been curated and assessed by myself, and with 11+ years of experience I know how to make the call for good software. On the other hand, with my studies in music production I know where some pain points lie in the music production process, pain points that before could only be solved with expensive software and now are cheaper to streamline.

[Shane Sanders]

I hear you. There's always going to be corporate gatekeeping of some sort, imo. For vibe coding, there's a price point barrier to get access to the deeper tools. While the cheaper $20 subscriptions will get you access, for deeper projects the subscriber is going to run out of computation hours each month and building things is going to take longer. For a determined person with patience, perhaps that works. But to do serious work, one needs the $100-200 tier access, so that moving forward happens at a clip that's equal to the inspiration. The casual tinkerer ain't going to pay that to conjure yet another delay or chorus.

Maybe prices come down, though. If JUCE didn't exist, even an A.I. would struggle to make something world-class for things like a DAW, where so many moving parts have to work together (usage conventions, MIDI specs, VST2/3, etc). Even with JUCE, the alpha-testing is a large time commitment for the human involved. And that's not even counting the actual thinking/design stage—another time commitment and one that will backfire if not vetted by both man and machine.

[diegorcortega]

I agree AI is becoming expensive, and not everyone will be able to build relevant music tech. The field is not level, but AI is helping indie devs like myself speed up development processes at a reasonably low cost. That does not mean that I don't have to learn to code audio software by myself or that AI will replace my thinking process, but it's some help in a world that used to lack cheap learning tools, courses, or tutorials. I've seen people argue that only PhD graduates are actually able to code DSP or that AI cannot code DSP. Both of those things are false. The actual entry barrier has lowered, and for people like myself with 11+ years of experience coding and developing real-time digital audio processing, AI is actually letting us move faster and focus on entering a very monopolistic market like the music tech one.

I see prices already going down, with all major plugin companies giving packs of plugins away for free or offering more discounts. The AI paradigm shift has already started to showcase the lack of innovation among big companies that are being chased by an increasing number of small companies that want some of that user base, which is discontent with all the bloatware, the false advertising, the extractive subscriptions, and the old plugins that everyone can now reproduce with AI prompts and some work.

And related to JUCE, that's a huge framework of tools that allows AI, and basically everyone, to build plugins, and that's amazing, but it is still a very bare-bones framework lacking many building blocks of any basic plugin, like circular buffers, for example. I had to build my own implementation of such just to be able to have some advanced DSP in my own plugins. Why JUCE is so slow to incorporate the basic requirements that the community of devs has been asking for for years is a mystery to me.

[BertKoor]

I wanted this, and the help of AI made it possible for me to make it.

Please label it "made with AI" please, so we have the option to skip the slop.

I wanted this, and the help of SynthEdit made it possible for me to make it.

Please label it "made with SynthEdit" please, so we have the option to skip the slop.