The $220M SaaS Hiding in Music Production Studios (Nobody's Building This)

There are roughly 120,000 commercial music production studios in the United States alone. Add home studios with at least one paying client, and that number jumps past 500,000. Globally, we're looking at well over a million studios that function as real businesses — invoicing clients, managing sessions, tracking revisions, splitting royalties, and delivering final masters.

Almost all of them run their operations on a combination of Google Sheets, iMessage threads, Dropbox links that expire, and handshake agreements about who owns what percentage of a song.

This is a quarter-billion-dollar software market that barely has any purpose-built tools. And the few that exist are so poorly designed that studios actively avoid using them.

Let me walk you through why this vertical is wide open, what's broken, and exactly what you'd build to capture it.

Why Music Production Is a Software Dead Zone

Every creative industry has gone through a SaaS transformation. Video production has Frame.io (acquired by Adobe for $1.3 billion). Architecture has Procore. Photography has HoneyBook and Dubsado. Graphic design has Canva's collaboration suite. Podcasting has Riverside and Descript.

Music production? It's stuck in 2011.

The reason is partly cultural. Studio owners tend to be audio engineers first and business operators second. They got into this because they love making records, not because they wanted to manage a services business. So they tolerate terrible workflows because the alternative — spending weeks evaluating and implementing business software — feels worse than just texting a client "hey can you re-send that vocal take?"

But the bigger reason is that nobody has built something that actually fits how studios work. The existing tools fall into two categories: generic project management software that doesn't understand audio workflows, and legacy music industry platforms built for labels and distributors, not for the studio itself.

This gap is enormous. And it's getting bigger, because the number of studios is growing fast. The democratization of music production tools (affordable DAWs, AI mastering, bedroom studio setups) means more people than ever are running studios as businesses. The global music production market was valued at around $4.5 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at 7-8% annually through 2030.

Even capturing a small slice of the operational software layer for these businesses represents a massive opportunity.

The Five Broken Workflows Nobody Has Fixed

I've mapped out the core operational pain points in music production studios, based on what's visible across forums like Gearslutz (now Gearspace), r/audioengineering, r/WeAreTheMusicMakers, and the countless YouTube videos where producers complain about the business side of their work. The same problems come up over and over.

1. Session Booking and Client Management

Studios book sessions through a chaotic mix of DMs, emails, phone calls, and texts. A typical studio might have three engineers, two rooms, and a rotating cast of 30-50 active clients in any given month. Coordinating who's in which room, when, with what equipment setup, while managing cancellations and rescheduling — it's a logistical nightmare.

You might think: "Just use Calendly." But studio sessions aren't appointments. A session might be booked for 4 hours but run 7. A client might need a specific room with specific outboard gear patched in. An engineer might be double-booked across rooms if one session is tracking and the other is mixing (since they can prep one while recording the other). The dependencies are complex in ways that generic scheduling tools can't handle.

Some studios have tried Dubsado or HoneyBook, but these are designed for photographers and event planners. They don't understand session types, room assignments, gear allocation, or the fluid nature of studio time.

2. File Management and Version Control

This is where things get genuinely painful. A single song might go through 15-30 revisions across tracking, mixing, and mastering. Each revision involves large files — a multitrack session can easily be 2-10 GB. Studios are managing this with Dropbox, Google Drive, or WeTransfer links.

The problems are predictable. Clients download the wrong version. Engineers can't find the latest mix. Someone overwrites a file. A hard drive fails and the only copy of the stems was on a WeTransfer link that expired 7 days ago.

There's no version control system designed for audio. Git doesn't work for binary files this large. Frame.io solved this for video — you can scrub through a timeline, leave timestamped comments, and approve specific versions. Nothing equivalent exists for audio production at the studio operations level.

Splice exists for collaboration between producers, but it's focused on the creative workflow (sharing samples, syncing DAW projects), not on the business relationship between a studio and its clients. A client who hired a studio to mix their album doesn't want to learn Splice. They want to click a link, hear their mix, and leave a comment at 2:34 saying "the snare is too loud here."

3. Royalty Splits and Rights Documentation

This is the ticking time bomb of the music industry. When a song is created in a studio, multiple people often contribute: the artist, the producer, the songwriter, the featured artist, sometimes the engineer who added a creative element. Each person's ownership percentage needs to be documented before the song is released.

In practice, this almost never happens at the time of creation. People figure it out later — or they don't, and it becomes a lawsuit when the song blows up. The music industry is littered with legal battles over undocumented splits.

Some tools exist for this (Splits by Distrokid, Auddly), but they're designed for after the fact. They're not integrated into the studio workflow. What's needed is something that captures splits at the point of creation — when everyone is still in the room (or on the Zoom) and can agree. A tool that's part of the session workflow, not a separate step that everyone forgets about.

4. Invoicing and Payment Collection

Studio invoicing is uniquely complicated. Sessions often have variable pricing: hourly rates that shift based on the room, the engineer, the time of day. Some clients pay per song. Some pay retainers. Some pay half upfront and half on delivery. Some never pay at all — late payment and non-payment is one of the most common complaints from studio owners.

Generic invoicing tools like FreshBooks or Wave can handle the basic math, but they don't integrate with the session workflow. An engineer finishes a 6-hour session at 2 AM and the last thing they want to do is manually create an invoice. The invoicing should be automatic — session ends, hours are logged, invoice is generated and sent.

And there's a specific payment model that's becoming more common: pay-per-stem delivery. Instead of invoicing for time, studios deliver the final mix or masters through a payment gate. The client pays, the files unlock. This is how stock music and beat marketplaces work, but there's no tool that lets a custom studio implement this for their clients.

5. Communication and Feedback Loops

The feedback loop between a studio and a client is absurdly inefficient. An engineer sends a mix. The client listens on their car speakers, their AirPods, their home stereo. They send back notes via text: "The vocals need to be louder in the chorus" and "Can you make the bass hit harder?" and "I liked the vibe of the version from two weeks ago better."

The engineer then has to interpret vague feedback, figure out which version the client is comparing to, and make changes without any precise reference points. This back-and-forth can go on for weeks on a single song.

What's needed is a review interface — like Frame.io for audio — where clients can listen to the latest version, leave timestamped comments, compare versions side by side, and formally approve a final mix. This alone would save studios dozens of hours per month.

The Competitive Landscape Is Almost Empty

When I looked at what exists in this space, I expected to find at least a few well-funded startups attacking this. Instead, I found a handful of small tools, each solving one piece of the puzzle, none of them well.

Studio Ninja and StudioSuite handle basic booking and invoicing but look like they were designed in 2008 and haven't been meaningfully updated since. Their interfaces are clunky, they don't handle the audio-specific workflows I described above, and their user reviews consistently mention the same frustrations.

Filepass is the closest thing to a delivery and review platform for audio, but it's focused narrowly on file delivery, not on the broader studio workflow.

Splice is well-funded and well-known, but it's a creative collaboration tool, not a studio business management platform.

HoneyBook and Dubsado get used by some studios, but these are generic creative-services CRMs. They don't understand rooms, sessions, gear, stems, mixes, or splits.

The point is: nobody has built the integrated platform that ties all five of these workflows together. That's the opportunity.

If you've read our analysis of what separates winning SaaS ideas from losers, you'll recognize the pattern here: a fragmented market using generic tools, high pain tolerance masking high willingness to pay, and no dominant vertical solution.

What You'd Actually Build

The MVP isn't all five workflows. It's one or two, done exceptionally well, with a clear path to expanding.

I'd start with session management + file delivery/review. These are the two highest-frequency pain points and they naturally connect: a session happens, files are produced, files need to be reviewed and approved.

The core product looks like this:

Session Dashboard. A calendar view that understands studio-specific concepts: rooms, engineers, gear setups, session types (tracking, mixing, mastering). Clients can request sessions, engineers can confirm, and the system handles the logistics of room and engineer availability. This replaces the text-message-and-spreadsheet chaos.

Audio Review Portal. When a mix or master is ready, the engineer uploads it to the platform. The client gets a link to a clean review interface where they can:

• Listen to the track with a waveform display
• Leave timestamped comments ("0:47 — the guitar is too bright here")
• Compare the current version to any previous version
• Formally approve the final version

This is the Frame.io model applied to audio, and it's the feature that would generate the most word-of-mouth. Engineers would share review links with clients, and those clients — many of whom are artists working with multiple studios — would see the platform and ask their other studios to use it too. This is the kind of product that essentially sells itself through its own usage pattern.

Automated Invoicing. When a session ends, the platform generates an invoice based on the session duration, rate, and any pre-agreed terms. For file delivery, you can optionally gate the final download behind payment — client pays, files unlock.

That's the MVP. Three features, tightly integrated, solving the most painful daily problems.

Phase two adds split sheet documentation (capture royalty splits during the session, generate a simple agreement that all parties sign digitally) and client CRM (track which clients are active, their payment history, their project status).

Phase three is where it gets really interesting: analytics and business intelligence for studios. Which rooms are most profitable? Which engineers generate the most revenue? What's the average session length by client type? What's the collection rate? Studio owners are flying blind on these metrics. Giving them a dashboard that shows the health of their business would be a massive differentiator.

Sizing the Opportunity

Let's be conservative.

In the US alone, there are an estimated 120,000 commercial recording studios. Globally, that number is at least 3-4x. But let's focus on English-speaking markets: US, UK, Canada, Australia. Call it 200,000 studios that could realistically be customers.

Now, not all of these are big operations. Many are one-person home studios. But even a solo producer running a mixing business has the same pain points — file delivery, client feedback, invoicing.

Pricing tiers:

• Solo producer: $29/month (1 room, 1 user, basic features)
• Small studio (2-3 rooms): $79/month
• Mid-size studio (4+ rooms, multiple engineers): $149/month
• Large studio: $249+/month

If you capture just 1% of the addressable market (2,000 studios) at an average of $59/month, that's $118,000/month in MRR — over $1.4 million ARR.

At 5% penetration (10,000 studios) with an average of $79/month, you're at $790,000/month — nearly $9.5 million ARR.

And this doesn't account for usage-based revenue opportunities: charging per file delivery (for high-volume studios), taking a small percentage of payments processed through the platform, or premium features like advanced analytics.

The $220M figure in the title? That's the estimated total addressable market if you include global studios, adjacent use cases (podcast studios, post-production houses, voiceover studios), and premium enterprise tiers. It's a real market that's large enough to build a serious business but niche enough that Salesforce isn't going to build a competitor.

Why the Timing Is Right Now

Three things are converging to make this the right moment:

AI is exploding the number of music creators. Tools like Udio, Suno, and the AI features being added to every DAW are lowering the barrier to music creation. More creators means more demand for professional studios (for the work that AI can't do well yet — recording live instruments, professional mixing, mastering). The market is growing.

The creator economy is professionalizing. Independent artists are increasingly running their music careers like businesses. They expect professional tools from the studios they work with. A studio that sends WeTransfer links and texts invoices looks amateur compared to one that has a branded client portal.

Building this is dramatically easier than it was five years ago. With AI coding tools like Claude and Cursor, a solo developer or small team can build a polished vertical SaaS product in months, not years. The audio review interface — which would have been the hardest technical challenge — can leverage existing web audio APIs and waveform visualization libraries. The invoicing and scheduling components are well-understood patterns. I track opportunities like this at SaasOpportunities specifically because the gap between market need and build difficulty has never been wider.

The Moat: Why This Isn't Easy to Copy

Vertical SaaS businesses build moats differently than horizontal ones. The moat here comes from three places:

Workflow integration. Once a studio sets up their rooms, engineers, rate cards, and client list in your platform, switching costs are high. Every session logged, every file delivered, every invoice sent creates more lock-in. After six months of use, a studio's entire operational history lives in your platform.

Network effects through the review portal. When a studio sends a client a review link, that client experiences your product. If that client works with other studios, they'll want the same experience everywhere. This is the same dynamic that made Dropbox and Slack spread through organizations — the product markets itself through usage.

Domain expertise as a barrier. Generic project management tools could theoretically add audio features, but they won't. It's not worth it for Asana to build timestamped audio commenting for a niche market. And a new competitor would need to deeply understand studio workflows to build something that actually fits. This domain knowledge — understanding session types, gear allocation, stem delivery, split sheets — is a real barrier that takes time to develop.

This is the same pattern we've seen work across successful vertical SaaS businesses: deep domain focus creates defensibility that horizontal tools can't match.

How You'd Get Your First 100 Studios

Distribution in vertical SaaS is about going where the customers already are. For music studios, that means:

Music production forums and communities. Gearspace (formerly Gearslutz), r/audioengineering, r/WeAreTheMusicMakers, and dozens of Facebook groups for studio owners. These communities are active and full of people complaining about exactly the problems you'd be solving. A well-crafted post showing your audio review portal in action would generate immediate interest.

YouTube producers and engineers. The music production YouTube ecosystem is massive. Engineers and producers with audiences of 10K-500K subscribers regularly make videos about the business side of running a studio. A tool that makes their workflow visibly better is something they'd naturally want to show their audience.

Studio directories and associations. Organizations like the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and studio listing sites are direct channels to your target market. Sponsoring a local AES chapter meeting or getting listed in studio resource directories puts you in front of buyers.

The review link itself. This is your most powerful distribution channel. Every time an engineer sends a client a review link, that client sees your branding. If you make the free tier generous enough for solo producers, you'll get thousands of review links circulating in the wild, each one a mini-advertisement for the platform.

The playbook for early traction in vertical SaaS is well-documented — if you want to go deeper, we've covered how SaaS products get their first 100 customers without ads.

The Tech Stack for a Solo Builder

This isn't a moonshot engineering project. The core components are:

• Frontend: Next.js or similar React framework for the dashboard and review portal
• Audio player: Wavesurfer.js for waveform display and timestamped commenting
• File storage: S3 or Cloudflare R2 for audio file hosting (R2 has no egress fees, which matters when you're serving large audio files)
• Payments: Stripe for invoicing and payment gating on file delivery
• Auth: Standard auth with a twist — you need both studio-side users (engineers, admins) and client-side users (artists, labels) with different permission levels
• Calendar: A custom session calendar that handles room/engineer/gear dependencies

The audio review portal is the most technically interesting piece, but it's not hard. Wavesurfer.js gives you waveform rendering out of the box. You add a commenting layer on top (store timestamps with comments), a version comparison feature (two audio players synced together), and an approval workflow. An experienced developer using Claude or Cursor could build a working prototype of this in a weekend.

The session management and invoicing components are more standard CRUD operations with some domain-specific logic. The whole MVP is buildable in 6-8 weeks for a solo developer, or 3-4 weeks for a small team.

What Could Go Wrong

I'd be dishonest if I didn't flag the risks.

Studios are notoriously cheap. Many studio owners operate on thin margins, especially smaller ones. You need to price low enough that the ROI is obvious — if your tool saves them even 2-3 hours per week of administrative work, a $79/month price point pays for itself immediately. But you'll need to make that value proposition crystal clear.

Adoption inertia is real. People who've been running their studio on spreadsheets and texts for a decade won't switch overnight. The review portal is your Trojan horse — it provides immediate, visible value to both the studio and the client, and it introduces the platform in a low-friction way. Start there, then expand into the operational features.

The market is fragmented. There's no single channel where all studio owners hang out. You'll need to work multiple channels simultaneously. This is typical for vertical SaaS and it's manageable, but it means growth will be steady rather than explosive.

A DAW company could build this. Avid (Pro Tools), Apple (Logic), or Ableton could theoretically add studio management features to their DAWs. In practice, DAW companies focus on the creative tool and have never shown interest in the business operations layer. But it's worth watching.

None of these risks are dealbreakers. They're the normal challenges of building any vertical SaaS business, and they're all manageable with the right approach. If you want a framework for evaluating whether risks like these should stop you or just inform your strategy, these filters for predicting SaaS success are worth reviewing.

The Bigger Vision

Once you own the studio operations layer, the expansion opportunities are significant.

Marketplace dynamics. If thousands of studios use your platform, you have a natural two-sided marketplace. Artists looking for studios could discover and book sessions through your platform. Studios get a new client acquisition channel. You take a booking fee. This is the long-term play that turns a vertical SaaS tool into a platform business.

Sync licensing integration. Studios produce music that often gets licensed for TV, film, and advertising. If your platform already manages the files and the rights documentation (split sheets), you're one integration away from connecting studios to sync licensing opportunities. This is a revenue stream for the studios and a premium feature for your platform.

AI-powered features. Audio analysis is getting remarkably good. Imagine a feature that automatically generates revision notes by comparing two versions of a mix ("Version 3 has 2dB more low-end energy between 60-120Hz compared to Version 2"). Or a feature that suggests optimal session scheduling based on historical patterns. These are the kinds of AI-powered additions that would make the platform genuinely indispensable.

The studio operations platform is the wedge. The ecosystem around it is where the real value compounds.

What to Do Next

If this opportunity resonates with you, the first step isn't building. It's validating.

Go to r/audioengineering and r/WeAreTheMusicMakers. Search for posts about studio management, client communication, file delivery, and invoicing. Read the complaints. Note the specific language people use to describe their pain. This gives you both validation and the exact copy you'll use on your landing page.

Then build the audio review portal as a standalone free tool. Just the waveform player with timestamped commenting and version comparison. Give it away. Let engineers send review links to their clients. Watch how people use it. Listen to what they ask for next.

That usage data and those feature requests become your roadmap for the full platform.

The music production industry is running on duct tape and good intentions. The studio that sends a client a clean, branded review portal with timestamped feedback and one-click approval is going to look like the future. And the platform that powers that experience is going to own a market that almost nobody is paying attention to yet.

That's the whole point of vertical SaaS: find the industry everyone overlooks, understand it better than anyone else, and build the tool they didn't know they were waiting for.