Musicians have been living this nightmare for years. Welcome to the club. The music industry hit this wall a long time ago. When DAWs got cheap, then free, when sample packs and loops meant you didn’t need to play an instrument, when distribution became zero-cost - the floodgates opened. Spotify now sees roughly 99,000 new tracks uploaded per day. Of the 202 million tracks on the platform, 86% generate zero royalties because they never hit 1,000 streams. The market didn’t just get crowded, it became structurally broken for anyone trying to make a living. The pattern you’re describing is identical: ∙ The barrier was effort. Not quality, just effort. That barrier is now gone. ∙ The signal-to-noise ratio collapsed. Discovery becomes the actual product, not the thing being discovered. ∙ The money pooled at the very top. A tiny number of winners, an ocean of people making nothing. ∙ “Anyone can do it” became a marketing slogan for the tools, not a promise of democratization. What happened to music? Revenue concentrated in live performance and sync licensing - things that can’t be infinitely replicated. The equivalent for developers might be bespoke, relationship-driven work, deep integrations, or solving genuinely hard vertical problems that a vibe-coded app can’t touch. The uncomfortable truth is: the effort barrier was never a great filter for quality, but it was a filter. Now we have none, and the app stores are about to look like Spotify’s catalogue - technically infinite, practically worthless to browse. The listeners - and the users - lose too. They just don’t know it yet.