The Napster Moment Is Coming for Software

I've been thinking about what happens after the chaos.

Right now, anybody can build software. You can describe a product in plain English and have a working prototype by the end of the day. You can generate marketing copy, write backend logic, ship a mobile app. The tools are cheap, some are free, and the barrier keeps dropping. This sounds like good news. I'm not sure it is.

When the cost of making something collapses to near zero, the thing itself stops being the asset. What becomes the asset is how you get it in front of people.

The music industry learned this the hard way.

Before personal computing and software like FL Studio, making music required a professional studio. Equipment was expensive. Time was expensive. The gatekeepers were the labels, and they sat at the point of creation. Then the tools got cheap. Suddenly anyone with a laptop could record an album in their bedroom, and millions of people did. The labels lost their grip on production. But here's what people miss about what happened next: they didn't die. They survived by shifting their grip to distribution.

Today, three companies handle the majority of recorded music distributed globally: Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group. They don't own the studios anymore. They own the pipeline. The deals with Spotify, Apple Music, and every other platform flow through them. You can make music without them. You cannot scale without them. That's the moat.

Now look at software.

AI is doing to software development what FL Studio did to music production. The cost of building is collapsing. Junior developers are feeling this first, but it goes further than that. Entire categories of SaaS products are getting undercut because companies can now build internal tools instead of buying them. The commodity wave is real and it's moving fast.

But here's what I keep thinking about: software has never had a distribution chokepoint.

Music had labels. Film has theatrical distribution controlled by a small number of studios. If you shoot a movie on your iPhone, there is no path to 3,000 theaters without going through that system. Hardware has Apple and Samsung controlling the physical channel. Software has none of that. The path from "I built something" to "a million people use it" runs through marketing spend, app store algorithms, word of mouth, and VC money. That's not a distribution channel. That's a lottery.

This is why VCs exist in the shape they do. Because there's no label to sign you, no studio to greenlight you, investors filling the vacuum. Pour enough money in, hope it catches. The absence of a controlled distribution channel is both the best and worst thing about software. It's why a two-person team in an apartment can build something used by 50 million people. It's also why 99% of good software never gets found.

I think this is about to change. And I think the change will be ugly before it gets clean.

The music parallel doesn't just tell us where things end up. It tells us the order of events. The labels didn't consolidate distribution because they saw the future and planned for it. They consolidated because they got destroyed first. Napster launched in 1999. For a decade, revenue fell off a cliff. The industry didn't stabilize until it cut deals with Apple for iTunes and later with Spotify. The consolidation was a response to near-death, not a strategy.

Software is entering its Napster moment now. The chaos is the first phase. Everyone can build. Nothing has value by default because volume is infinite. The developers who spent years acquiring skills that are now partially automated are in the same position as session musicians in 2002. The pain is real and I don't think minimizing it does anyone any favors.

What comes after that is the part I'm less certain about but feel strongly is coming: someone builds the distribution channel for software on purpose.

Maybe it's a hyperscaler. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud already control deployment infrastructure, so there's an argument they're already the channel without calling it that. But controlling infrastructure isn't the same as controlling distribution. Nobody goes to AWS to discover software the way a listener goes to Spotify to find music. The discovery layer doesn't exist yet. The layer that says: this product, to this audience, at this scale, guaranteed.

That's the gap. And whoever fills it will have the kind of structural position the major labels built for themselves after the Napster chaos settled down.

The risk is obvious. A software distribution monopoly would be worse than a music one, because software sits underneath everything now. If one company decides what gets distributed and what doesn't, the implications reach into healthcare, finance, and government in ways that a label controlling chart position simply doesn't.

But the gap exists whether or not we want it to. The question isn't whether someone builds this. It's who, and whether it gets built with any awareness of what they're actually constructing.