In February 2018, Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell started work on an album in his small bedroom studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles. When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? came out just over a year later and went on to sweep the 2020 Grammys — Album of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Engineered Album, with "Bad Guy" taking Record of the Year and Song of the Year, and Finneas himself winning Producer of the Year, Non-Classical. It became the go-to proof that a commercial studio wasn’t required to make a record the industry’s biggest award show would call the best of the year. What’s more interesting than that one album is that it wasn’t a fluke — the same basic setup kept scaling for years afterward.
The follow-up is the actual proof
Five years later, Eilish and Finneas made Hit Me Hard and Soft the same way — at Finneas’s home studio, over roughly sixteen months from October 2022 to February 2024 — and this time the results were bigger, not smaller. The album debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 339,000 equivalent units, her largest first-week total and highest pure sales to date, and all ten of its tracks landed in the Hot 100’s top 40 simultaneously. The production itself had grown up alongside the setup: live drums and string arrangements from the Attacca Quartet sit next to Eilish’s usual close-mic vocal style, on a Metacritic 89 record that critics praised for moving between delicate and forceful without losing cohesion. A home studio didn’t just repeat 2019’s trick — it produced a more ambitious, better-reviewed, higher-charting record five years later.
The other end of the spectrum: no studio gear at all
Eilish and Finneas at least had a real studio, just not a commercial one. Steve Lacy’s "Dark Red" and his 2017 EP Steve Lacy’s Demo were made almost entirely on an iPhone — GarageBand for the recording itself, an IK Multimedia iRig adapter to plug in a guitar, Akai’s iMPC app for chopping drums and samples. "Dark Red" wasn’t an instant hit; it found its real audience through a TikTok wave that started in August 2021, five years after it was first released, well after phone-only production had stopped being a novelty and started being just another way records get made.
The market underneath the anecdotes
None of this is a handful of lucky outliers propped up by press coverage — there’s a real, growing industry behind it. The global digital audio workstation software market was valued at $4.4 billion in 2025, and analyst projections put it at $8.9 billion by 2033, a 9.4% annual growth rate. Software specifically made up close to 58% of that 2025 revenue. That’s the actual infrastructure behind "anyone can make a record at home" — a market big enough, and growing fast enough, that Grammy-winning albums coming out of a converted bedroom stopped being the exception worth writing headlines about and started being one of several completely normal paths to a finished record.
What "the end of the studio" actually means
Commercial studios haven’t disappeared — plenty of records, including plenty of hits, still get made in them. What’s changed is that they’re no longer the only credible path to a record the industry takes seriously at the highest level, from a Grammy Album of the Year built in a bedroom to a $339,000-first-week release built in a nicer version of the same setup five years later. The studio isn’t dead. It’s just stopped being a gate anyone actually has to pass through.