No, the Plugin Industry Is Not Dying

Every week my feed tells me the plugin industry is dead.

Red arrows. Shocked faces. "AI is KILLING plugins." "It's BAD."

I've spent 20-plus years helping companies through exactly this kind of change, and I've heard "X is dead" more times than I can count.

It's never been true. And I don't think it's true this time either.

So what's the argument?

To be fair, part of it is right depending on the perspective you're taking.

AI can build a working plugin fast. I know because I did it. I built an LA-2A-style opto compressor with AI and put it up against Softube's Opto and UAD's free LA-2A. It sounded close enough to make me grin.

AI can also study what a plugin does and get pretty close to copying it. And of course, REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) can duplicate a plugin's code exactly. Those are the easy parts.

The hard part? Selling them in what is clearly an oversaturated market. There are at least 20 LA/2A style plugins from major plugin companies out there and god knows how many from boutique plugin providers.

So the logic goes: if anyone can build their own, why would anyone pay for one? Plugin companies are toast.

That's the microview. It looks at one step and calls it the whole industry.

Isn't building it the hard part?

Here's what nobody in those thumbnails talks about.

Building a plugin is maybe 10% of the job. The other 90% is:

• Updating it every time Apple or Microsoft changes something
• Testing it in Logic, Pro Tools, Ableton, Cubase, Reaper, Luna and whatever comes next
• Customer support, licensing, refunds
• Marketing, so anyone finds it among thousands of others

I built a compressor. Am I about to support it for 10,000 strangers when macOS updates and it stops loading? Hell no.

Attack Magazine put it well: today's vibe-coded plugins could easily be tomorrow's abandonware. That's the real risk. Not that plugin companies die, but that a pile of cheap clones show up, break, and disappear.

To be fair again: big brands abandon plugins too. A famous name is no guarantee. Look at a company's track record for updates, not its logo.

Haven't we seen this before?

When Napster showed up, everyone said the music industry was dead. Recorded music revenue has now grown 11 years in a row.

When open source took off, everyone said paid software was dead. Microsoft called Linux a cancer, then bought GitHub for $7.5 billion.

People still laugh at Kodak for missing digital. But guess what? A Kodak engineer *invented* the digital camera, and the company is still around. It just looks different now.

The industries didn't die. They changed, and the companies that adapted came out fine.

So what actually changes?

When I was teaching companies how to adopt Lean Startup back in 2012-ish, I remember seeing an intersting stat that by the time you're reading this, 50 new companies would have spun up and just as many would have died off. I ran my own global consulting and training business for 20 years. It's not easy.

The point is, companies die and spawn all the time. Those that can manage disruption just survive longer.

Some boutique plugin shops will get bought by the big players. Some will go under. That's not the industry dying. That's business, and it was happening long before AI showed up.

The me-too plugins, the fifth "vintage tape" emulation that does nothing new, get squeezed. Companies with real ideas, real support and real trust do fine. Probably better than fine, because a flood of cheap junk makes trusted brands worth more.

And the market's still growing. One estimate has it going from about $2.1 billion in 2025 to $2.3 billion this year. Take those numbers with a grain of salt, but they're not the numbers of a dying industry.

What does this mean for solo artists?

If you're just getting started, this is actually good news.

• Plugins are getting cheaper. Competition does that. Black Friday is about to prove it.
• You can build simple tools yourself. A basic compressor or a tone-shaping pedal for your own use? Totally doable now. I'll show you how.
• Buy your workhorse plugins from people who'll still be around. The thing you mix every song with should come from a company that updates it.
• Ignore the panic. Nothing you own is about to stop working because of a YouTube thumbnail.

Why all the "dead" videos, then?

Because "dead" gets clicks and "it's changing" doesn't. Fear sells. That's not a dig at anyone, it's just how the algorithm works.

Bottom line

Next time you see "X is dead," ask yourself one question: dead, or just changing?

It's almost always the second one.