Making a Scene Presents

Jovin Webb did not find the blues. He was born into them. Raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Webb grew up surrounded by gospel music, Southern church culture, Gulf Coast grit, and the kind of real-life struggle that has always fed the deepest blues. He built his voice the old-fashioned way: singing from lived experience, playing night after night, and learning how to turn pain, faith, temptation, survival, and hope into music that sounds both ancient and urgently alive. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Leslie Waugh Leslie Waugh is a Texas-based Americana singer-songwriter whose music tells the kind of stories that country music was built to carry: not the glossy kind about beer, trucks, and easy slogans, but the deeper kind about identity, reinvention, disappointment, resilience, love, and the strange grace of finding your own voice later than expected. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Song You Already Own May Be Your Best Investment The Music Business Has Finally Discovered Something Artists Should Have Known All Along For most of the history of the record business, artists were trained to think about music in release cycles. You wrote a song, recorded it, released it, promoted it for a few months, crossed your fingers, annoyed your friends with social media posts, and eventually moved on to the next record. The old album was pushed toward the back of the shelf while everybody chased whatever was supposed to happen next. The financial world has been looking at music very differently. Investors, publishers, labels, private equity firms, royalty companies, and catalog buyers increasingly look at a song not simply as something that was released three years ago, but as an asset capable of producing income for many years into the future. That difference in thinking is enormous, because once you stop treating your catalog like yesterday's news, you start asking very different questions about what the music you already own could be doing for you. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Direct-to-Fan Platforms Are Becoming Discovery Platforms. Don’t Make the Same Mistake Twice There was always something pleasantly old-fashioned about the original idea behind https://www.patreon.com/. You went out into the world, made music, played shows, posted videos, appeared on podcasts, begged the algorithm gods for mercy, handed out flyers, annoyed your friends, annoyed your friends’ friends, and somehow found people who cared about what you did. Then Patreon gave some of those people a way to support you every month. It was less like a giant advertising billboard and more like a cash register sitting near the back of the club. That basic bargain was easy to understand. You brought the fan, and Patreon helped you monetize the relationship. Patreon did not have to become Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, a record store, a fan club and your manager all before lunch. That distinction is getting blurrier. On August 20, 2026, Patreon CEO Jack Conte published a large product roadmap describing a much more ambitious Patreon. The company is not simply trying to help creators make money from people they already know. It increasingly wants to help creators get discovered by people they have never met, move those people into free memberships, deepen the relationship through content and community, and eventually convert some of them into paying supporters. For independent musicians, that could be very good news. It could also create exactly the kind of temptation that has gotten artists into trouble before. If one platform can help you get discovered, publish your work, communicate with supporters, host video, run a community, sell digital products, collect membership payments and analyze the audience, why bother building anything outside that platform? Because discovery is valuable, while dependency is dangerous. That distinction may become one of the most important business lessons an independent artist can learn http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Don’t Close the Session Yet: Build the Revenue Package When You Finish the Master The Song Is Finished. The Business Asset Is Not. There is a wonderful moment in every recording project when everybody finally agrees that the song is finished. The singer has stopped asking whether one word in the second verse could be louder. The guitar player has accepted that the solo does not need another half-decibel. The mastering engineer has sent the file called something reassuring like SONGTITLE_FINAL_MASTER.wav, and for one brief shining moment nobody has added the words “new,” “revised,” or “really final” to the filename. This is usually when the independent artist exports the stereo master, sends it to a distributor, uploads the artwork, picks a release date, and closes the recording session with the satisfied feeling that the job is done. That made a certain amount of sense when the main job of a record was to become a record, but today's finished recording can do far more than sit inside Spotify, Apple Music, or somebody's phone. That open recording session is actually sitting on top of a small factory. The master recording is there, but so are the ingredients for an instrumental version, alternate mixes, useful stem groups, shorter edits, clean endings, remix materials, creator licenses, sync versions, direct-to-fan products, and assets that may someday become valuable in licensing systems we have not even invented yet. The strange part is that the cheapest and easiest time to create most of those things is right now, when everybody still remembers how the record was made. Six years from now is not nearly as convenient. Six years from now the computer may be gone, the plugin company may be gone, the engineer may be working in another state, and somebody will be standing in front of a closet full of hard drives muttering the traditional recording-industry prayer: “Where the hell did we put that vocal stem?” That is why independent artists need to change the definition of finished. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - September 1 Is a Warning: Build an Exit Package for Every Music Platform There are certain phrases no musician wants to see in the subject line of an email from a company holding an important piece of their career. “Important changes to your account” is one. “Service transition” is another. “We’re evolving” usually means somebody in a conference room has made a decision that is about to create several hours of work for people who were not invited to the conference room. Then there is the granddaddy of them all: “sunsetting.” Corporate language is wonderfully peaceful. Nothing ever closes, gets killed or breaks. Services are “realigned,” products “evolve,” businesses “transition” and features “sunset,” as though your stems, royalty records and release metadata are peacefully retiring to a beach house in Florida. That is roughly the situation Songtradr users are facing now. Songtradr’s official help center says its Marketplace will close on September 1, 2026. The company first published closure guidance dated June 1, then expanded its transition information later in June to explain how certain distribution functions and account information are moving to MassiveMusic for Rightsholders while Songtradr points artists toward Bandcamp for direct-to-fan activity. Songtradr itself is not disappearing, and neither is the larger Songtradr group. What is disappearing is the open Marketplace that many independent artists used as part licensing service, part distribution system, part catalog manager and, whether they planned it or not, part filing cabinet. Songtradr’s current transition guidance http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Hugh Pool and Jon Ragusa of Mulebone Mulebone is the long-running blues and roots partnership of guitarist, vocalist, songwriter, and producer Hugh Pool and multi-instrumentalist Jon Ragusa. Built on the foundation of traditional blues, the duo takes the language of country blues, folk, roots music, and early American song forms and stretches it into something soulful, agile, and adventurous. At the heart of Mulebone is a rare musical conversation between two players who know the tradition well enough to honor it, but not so carefully that they forget to have some fun with it. Their music can move from slide-guitar boogies and one-chord trance riffs in the spirit of Howlin’ Wolf to the uptempo ragtime snap of Reverend Gary Davis and the rural textures of country blues. Sometimes they play close to the source, almost tracing the outline of the original form. At other times, they step back, lift the music into the air, and look at it from a new angle. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Bright Black Bright Black is a Midlands alt-metal band from England, bringing together the force of modern hard rock, the emotional weight of metal, and the kind of melodic intensity that makes heavy music hit harder than volume alone. Hailing from Northamptonshire and the Midlands, the band formed in 2022 and has quickly begun carving out a place in the UK underground rock and metal scene. Built around the lineup of Talitha, Witt, Alex, and James, Bright Black creates music driven by raw emotion, heavy riffs, anthemic energy, and a live presence designed to move a room. Their sound sits in the space where alternative metal, hard rock, and modern melodic heaviness collide, balancing aggression with atmosphere and power with feeling. http://www.makingascene.org

https://www.makingascene.org The Place the Indie Artist goes to Build the New Music Industry Making a Scene Presents - One Song, Many Products: How Indie Artists Can Turn a Recording Into a Revenue Catalog We Have Been Selling the Song Far Too Cheaply An independent artist can spend weeks writing a song, another week arranging it, several days recording it, more time editing and mixing it, then hand it to a mastering engineer before finally releasing it into the world. After all that work, the finished product often becomes one WAV file that gets sent to a distributor, which turns it into a streaming product that might earn tiny pieces of money one play at a time. Then everybody packs up, congratulates themselves on release day, and starts worrying about writing the next song. There is nothing wrong with streaming the song. The mistake is thinking the streaming master is the only product you created. A professionally produced song can become the foundation of an entire family of products. The original master can live beside an instrumental master, clean version, alternate mix, stems, short advertising edits, video stings, premium fan content, remix material, educational material, direct-download products, sync assets, licensing packages and, increasingly, carefully controlled assets that may someday be licensed for artificial-intelligence uses. The artist did the expensive creative work once, but the business can keep finding new ways to package that work. This does not mean that every song should be chopped into 47 files and offered for sale to anybody with a credit card and a pulse. Some versions have a clear commercial purpose, while others only make sense for particular songs. The larger point is that a song should be treated as intellectual property and business inventory rather than a disposable piece of content whose career begins and ends when it hits Spotify. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents -When the Recording Carries the License: AI, Audio Provenance and the Future of Artist-Owned Rights An A2IM spotlight on SonicOrigin points toward a future where a recording can carry a persistent connection to its ownership and AI-licensing terms even after ordinary metadata disappears. Making a Scene is moving in the same direction with the MAS Audio Fingerprint system, connecting both Sync and AI licensing to the artist-controlled Fan Passport source of truth. Together, these ideas suggest that the next generation of music files may do something recordings have historically been terrible at doing: explain who owns them, what they can be used for and where somebody can go to legally spend money. Your Recording Has Always Been Terrible at Introducing Itself A modern recording can travel around the world faster than most musicians can find a clean pair of socks for the gig. You can finish a master in Georgia, send it to somebody in Los Angeles, have it dropped into a video project in London and discover it playing from somebody's phone in Berlin before you have finished arguing about whether the vocal should have been half a decibel louder. What generally does not travel nearly as well is everything that explains what that recording actually is as a business asset. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - AI Licensing Is Becoming a Contract Business: What Indie Artists Must Demand Before They Opt In The AI Fight Is Learning to Speak Contract For the last few years, the music industry’s argument over artificial intelligence has mostly sounded like a fight about permission. AI companies have wanted enormous amounts of material to develop increasingly capable systems, while songwriters, artists, publishers, labels, and other rights holders have been asking a fairly basic question: who gave you permission to use our work in the first place? That fight is far from finished, but something more interesting is beginning to happen alongside it. The conversation is slowly shifting from whether AI companies should license music toward what an actual AI music license should contain, how much it should be worth, and how much control the creator should keep after signing it. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Build the Stack, Own the Fan: How Independent Artists Can Create a Sustainable Music Business Stop Waiting for One Check to Save Your Career Independent artists have spent decades being sold different versions of the same dream. There is always supposed to be one thing that changes everything, whether that thing is a record deal, radio airplay, a viral video, a giant playlist, a million streams, a social-media breakthrough, an NFT collection, or whatever shiny object arrives next Tuesday. The problem is that sustainable businesses rarely depend on one source of income. A recent Warner Music Group earnings report provided a useful reminder of this because the company's growth was spread across streaming, physical music, artist services and expanded rights, and several publishing categories rather than coming from one magical royalty stream. That does not mean an independent artist should try to become Warner Music, but it does mean there is something worth stealing from the business model. The lesson is simple. Stop looking for one revenue stream that will support everything, and start building several connected ways for the music, the rights, the audience, the live show, and the artist's skills to create income. That is the revenue stack. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with the All Night Boogie Band All Night Boogie Band is an award-winning blues, rock, and soul-inspired band from the Green Mountains of Vermont, built on big vocals, hard-driving grooves, gritty guitar work, and a deep affection for the sound and spirit of American roots music. Since forming in 2021, the band has developed a reputation as one of Vermont’s most energetic live acts, delivering original music with the power of a roadhouse blues band, the swing of a horn-fueled soul revue, and the urgency of rock and roll. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Gloria In Ireland, the name Gloria carries a special kind of recognition. For generations of country and showband fans, it points to Gloria Smyth, later widely known as Gloria Sherry, the Navan-born singer whose recording of “One Day at a Time” became one of the defining Irish country hits of the late 1970s. Born in County Meath in 1951, Gloria grew up in a musical family. Her father, Jimmy Smyth, led The Arcadians, and Gloria’s first taste of show business came early, dancing and playing accordion with the family band. Music was not a hobby waiting politely in the corner. It was part of the household, part of the working life, and part of the world she stepped into as a young performer. http://www.makingascene.org

The Platform Dependency Audit: Could Your Music Business Survive If One Company Disappeared Tomorrow? There is a strange little habit in the music business that we have somehow learned to accept as normal. Artists spend years creating music, building audiences, selling tickets, gathering followers, uploading catalogs, collecting customer information, and developing relationships, and then they store enormous pieces of that business inside companies they do not control. That arrangement can work beautifully right up until it doesn't. A platform changes its pricing, removes a feature, sells itself, changes its algorithm, modifies its licensing program, restricts an account, changes ownership, decides your favorite feature was apparently not as beloved inside the quarterly earnings meeting as it was inside your business, and suddenly you discover exactly which parts of your career you actually owned. This is why every independent artist should perform what we might call a platform dependency audit. The idea is simple: identify the outside companies your music business cannot comfortably operate without, and then figure out what would happen if one of them vanished tomorrow. Not because every platform is evil. Not because the internet is collapsing. Not because you should unplug your computer, move into a cabin, and begin selling hand-carved CDs to passing hikers. Platforms can be incredibly useful. Some of them are responsible for enormous amounts of discovery, sales, distribution, communication, licensing, ticketing, and creative work. The problem begins when an artist mistakes access to a platform for ownership of a business. Those are two very different things. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - YouTube Changed Creator Music. Making a Scene Is Building the Artist-Owned Alternative YouTube Changed the Store. The Bigger Lesson Is Who Owns the Store. On August 10, 2026, YouTube crossed an interesting line with Creator Music. According to YouTube’s own current Help Center, the company deprecated paid Creator Music licenses and began shifting Creator Music toward gratis, or free, license strategies. Existing licenses already in use remain in force until the end of their terms, but the paid licensing marketplace that creators and rights holders had been learning to use is being phased out. YouTube explains the current transition at https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11273150?hl=en. That does not mean Creator Music itself has vanished, and it does not mean YouTube suddenly stopped caring about music licensing. YouTube’s current Creator Music FAQ at https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11610609?hl=en still describes Creator Music as a catalog that can support licensed and revenue-sharing uses depending on the terms attached to a track, even while the rights-holder documentation says paid license strategies are being retired in favor of gratis licensing. The important part for independent artists is not arguing over which button YouTube will move next. It is recognizing what happens when a useful business function lives inside somebody else’s platform. A company launches a feature. Artists and rights holders begin building workflows around it. Creators learn how to purchase music through it, catalogs are organized for it, and then the platform changes direction because its business priorities change. That is normal technology-company behavior. It is also one more reason an independent artist should never confuse access to a platform with ownership of a business. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - When YouTube Removes the Cash Register: What the Creator Music Change Means for Indie Artists For the last few years, YouTube Creator Music offered independent musicians something worth paying attention to. A video creator could find certain songs inside YouTube’s licensing marketplace, pay an upfront fee for permission to use one of those tracks, and then use that music in an eligible monetized video while keeping the normal revenue share from the video. For the music rights holder, the arrangement created something that looked remarkably like a small-scale synchronization licensing marketplace. It was not Hollywood money, and nobody was ordering a new swimming pool because a cooking channel licensed their instrumental, but it created a relatively simple way for music owners and video creators to do business with each other. Now that paid part of Creator Music is going away. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Gabriel Mas Gabriel Más is the spiritual and creative continuation of Gabriel Bondage, the 1970s progressive rock band that built its identity around ambitious compositions, mystical themes, and a restless desire to push music beyond ordinary boundaries. The name Gabriel Más, with más meaning “more” in Spanish, reflects both a return and an expansion: a new chapter rooted in the past, but not confined by it. The project is led by original Gabriel Bondage member Rex Bundy and longtime friend, collaborator, and musical partner Rich Reardin. Together, they have created a rebirth that honors the spirit of Gabriel Bondage while opening the door to new songs, new sounds, and a broader creative vision. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Harrell "Young Rell" Davenport How does a 19-year-old blues artist from Vicksburg, Mississippi play his first gig in Chicago and end up with 165,000 views and 4,000 shares of the performance on Facebook? In the case of Harrell “Young Rell” Davenport, the answer is simple: he is one of the most exciting young voices rising in the blues today. Young Rell began playing harmonica and guitar at the age of seven, discovering early that the blues gave him both a language and a lifeline. As a child, he faced personal struggles and trauma, and he found comfort in music born from hardship, resilience, and survival. The blues became more than a style for him. It became a way to understand pain, express emotion, and turn difficult experience into something honest and powerful. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - DI vs. Mic Recording for Guitars and Bass: What’s the Difference? Two Ways to Capture the Same Player Put a bass player or guitarist in front of a recording system and you can capture the performance in two very different places. You can take the electrical signal straight from the instrument before it reaches a loudspeaker, or you can place a microphone in front of an amplifier and record the sound after the amp, speaker, cabinet, air, and room have all changed it. That is the basic difference between DI and microphone recording, but it is not a contest between the “real” method and the “fake” method. Both are real, both have been used on successful records, and both can be either wonderful or awful depending on the player, instrument, song, room, equipment, and decisions being made. For an independent artist, the best method is not always the one that looks most impressive in a studio photo. It is the method that captures the emotion of the performance, fits the production, stays within the budget, and gives the artist enough flexibility to finish the record without creating a technical hostage situation. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - TREBEL Buys Sesh and the Race to Own the Superfan Layer Begins For most of the streaming era, the music platform business has revolved around one basic action: getting someone to press play. The listener searches for a song, finds a playlist, follows a recommendation, or taps whatever the algorithm places in front of them. The platform tracks the activity, serves an advertisement or collects a subscription payment, and sends a small portion of the revenue through the music-rights system. The artist receives a stream count, a royalty report, and perhaps a map showing where the listening took place. Everyone calls this engagement, although the artist usually still has no idea who engaged. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Grammys Leave CBS for Disney: The Money, Media Power, and Politics Behind Music’s Biggest Move For more than half a century, the Grammy Awards and CBS seemed permanently attached. The golden gramophone showed up on CBS every winter like an old relative who never needed directions to the house. Hosts changed, musical styles changed, television changed, and musicians went from selling records to chasing fifteen-second video trends. Yet the Grammys stayed put. That long marriage has now ended. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Universal Music’s Stock Crash Is a Warning About Building a Career on Streaming Alone The Music Business Had a Very Bad Day On July 31, 2026, Universal Music Group had the kind of day that gets the attention of everyone in the music business. Shares of the world’s largest music company lost roughly one-quarter of their value in Amsterdam. It was Universal Music Group’s worst trading day since the company became publicly traded in September 2021. The decline erased approximately $10 billion from the company’s market value, based on the exchange rate at the time. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Billy Branch Billy Branch is one of the most respected living ambassadors of Chicago blues: an Emmy Award winner, three-time Grammy Award nominee, retired Grammy governor, Blues Hall of Fame inductee, educator, actor, narrator, humanitarian, and master harmonica player whose career has carried the sound of the blues around the world. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Billy Price Billy Price is a Blues Music Award-winning soul-blues vocalist whose powerful voice, deep musical roots, and decades-long career have made him one of the most respected singers in contemporary blues and soul music. Known for his commanding stage presence and emotionally rich vocal delivery, Price has built a career defined by authenticity, consistency, and a lifelong commitment to the music. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Your Distributor Is Becoming Your Storefront: Private Equity, Consolidation, and the Fight for the Independent Artist’s Customer For many independent artists, choosing a music distributor feels like choosing a mailbox. You upload the song, type in the title, attach the artwork, enter enough names and numbers to make your eyes glaze over, and then wait for the music to appear on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, TikTok, and the rest of the digital neighborhood. The distributor delivers the package. The stores play the music. Royalties eventually trickle back. Everybody goes home. That simple picture is becoming badly outdated. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Clark Paterson Clark Paterson does not write songs from a safe distance. He writes them from the middle of the wreckage: hospital rooms, court dates, bar shifts at Robert’s Western World, old farmhouses mid-restoration, garages cluttered with vintage car parts, and the strange emotional territory between heartbreak, survival, and redemption. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Build a Content Strategy That Brings Fans Home Every independent artist has heard the same advice. Post more. Make more videos. Be consistent. Feed the algorithm. Dance near the chorus. Point at floating words. Pretend your drummer did something shocking in the studio. Some of that may help people discover you. None of it automatically gives you a music business. A social media post can earn thousands of views and still leave the artist with no useful way to contact the people who watched it. A song can land on a playlist, gain streams, and disappear from the listener’s life as soon as the platform serves the next track. A video can go viral while ticket sales remain stubbornly committed to remaining exactly where they were. The problem is not that social media and streaming are useless. They are extremely useful when given the right job. They are doors of discovery. They are not the house. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Your Fans Are Not Portable Just Because Your Songs Are Your Fans Are Not Portable Just Because Your Songs Are On July 22, 2026, SoundCloud announced that it had acquired the remaining assets of Nina Protocol, an independent music platform built around direct artist-to-fan sales, editorial discovery, and blockchain-based ownership tools. The acquisition included Nina’s editorial archive and its genre map, a system designed to connect artists, releases, scenes, and musical communities. SoundCloud also introduced an optional migration process that gives Nina artists a way to move their music, content, and followers into SoundCloud’s creator ecosystem. Artists are not being moved automatically. Each artist must decide whether to take part, and the financial terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed. At first glance, this may look like a relatively small technology acquisition. One company closed, a larger company bought some of what remained, and artists were offered a way to move their work. The editorial archive may survive, the genre map may find a new life, and former Nina artists may gain access to a larger creator platform. From a distance, it looks like the music industry version of moving boxes from one apartment to another and hoping none of the cables disappear. But this story raises a much larger and more uncomfortable question for independent musicians. When an artist-friendly platform shuts down, gets acquired, runs out of funding, changes direction, or simply disappears, which parts of an artist’s business can actually travel with the artist? Music files may be easy to copy. Artwork may be downloadable. A biography can be pasted into a new profile. Even a follower count may sometimes be carried into another system. The harder issue is whether the business relationship behind those numbers can move too. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The AI Copyright Fight Will Be Won by Whoever Has the Best Records Sony’s New Lawsuit Comes With a Very Long Song List Sony Music Entertainment filed another federal lawsuit against AI music company Udio on July 20, 2026. This time, Sony’s complaint concerns more than 30,000 sound recordings that it claims were copied and used in connection with Udio’s generative AI models without permission. That is an enormous number of recordings. It is large enough to make the average independent artist stare at their own hard drive, notice three folders named “Old Masters,” and quietly close the laptop. Sony had previously attempted to add 30,442 recordings to the lawsuit it originally brought against Udio in 2024. On July 2, 2026, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein denied that request, leaving the earlier case focused on 333 works that remained in the original action. Sony responded by filing a separate lawsuit covering the additional recordings. Sony says it found the additional works after gaining access to information about Udio’s training data during legal discovery. According to Sony’s allegations, it then used audio-fingerprinting technology to compare that information with recordings in its catalog. Those words matter: according to Sony’s allegations. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Leeann Atherton Leeann Atherton is a country, gospel, and blues singer-songwriter based in Austin, Texas, with a voice shaped by the South, the road, and a lifetime of hard-earned musical instinct. Her sound carries the grit of the blues, the warmth of gospel, and the storytelling heart of country music, delivered with the kind of honesty that cannot be faked. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview With Paul Sherry Paul Sherry is an award-winning Irish guitarist, singer, songwriter, session musician, touring artist, and educator whose music bridges blues-rock tradition with modern rock depth. Best known to many listeners as the lead guitarist with the award-winning Gráinne Duffy Band, Sherry has also carved out his own identity as a solo artist, bringing together fiery guitar work, soulful vocals, and songs shaped by experience, craft, and intention. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Silver Summer Silver Summer makes music for the neon hours: the space between last call and sunrise, between memory and possibility, between heartbreak and the reckless feeling that something beautiful might still happen before morning. Blending 1970s glam, disco, and punk with a shimmering wash of 1980s synths, the Mankato, Minnesota band creates a sound that feels both nostalgic and futuristic, like a lost dance-floor anthem beamed in from another timeline. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - What Sound Actually Is: The Science Every Musician Should Understand Before the Microphone, Something Has to Move Every recording begins with movement. Before the microphone, the preamp, the audio interface, the computer, the waveform, the compressor, and the plugin with the picture of a rusty spaceship, something must vibrate. A singer pushes air from the lungs past the vocal folds. Those folds open and close rapidly. A guitarist plucks a string, causing it to move back and forth. A drummer strikes a drumhead, which bends inward and springs back. A cymbal flexes in many directions at once. A piano hammer hits a string. A loudspeaker cone moves forward and backward. That movement pushes and pulls on the air around it. Air may look like empty space, but it is filled with tiny molecules. When a guitar string moves, it pushes nearby air molecules closer together. Those molecules bump into the next group, which bumps into another group. When the string moves back, it leaves a slightly less crowded area behind it. The result is a traveling pattern of higher and lower pressure. That traveling pressure pattern is a sound wave. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The New Music Search Engine Is a Conversation The Search Box Just Learned How to Talk Picture a music fan driving home late at night. The road is empty, the dashboard is glowing, and the fan wants to hear something new. In the old days, this person might search for “blues rock,” open a playlist with a picture of a guitar on the cover, and begin skipping through songs that all seem to have been chosen by the same mysterious fellow wearing sunglasses indoors. Now the fan may be able to ask a much better question. “Find me a blues-rock artist from Atlanta with powerful female vocals, strong guitar work, and songs that sound good on a late-night drive.” That is not a normal search. It is a description of a need. The listener is not naming an artist or requesting a song title. The listener is describing a sound, a place, a voice, a mood, and a moment. This is where music discovery is heading. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - AI Training Royalties Are Coming—But Will Indie Artists Get Paid? Artificial intelligence companies have spent the past few years treating music like an unattended buffet. Recordings, lyrics, artwork, voices, performances, and entire creative styles have been pulled into giant data collections. Artists were often left wondering whether their work had been used, who used it, what it helped create, and whether anybody planned to pay them. Now the music business is beginning to move toward a different model. Instead of taking first and arguing about permission later, some companies are trying to build licensed AI systems in which creators can choose whether their work is included. That sounds better. It probably is better. But “better than unpaid scraping” is a pretty low bar. A raccoon with a stolen sandwich could clear it. The real question is not whether AI licensing programs will exist. They are already beginning to appear. The real question is whether independent artists will receive fair payments, useful reports, meaningful control, and enough information to know whether the deal makes sense. There is also another uncomfortable question. When an AI company finally comes looking for licensed music, will the artist be able to prove what they own? http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Music Industry Does Not Have a Fan Problem. It Has a Customer-Ownership Problem An independent artist sits in front of a laptop, staring at numbers that should feel exciting. The new single has passed 100,000 streams. A video has collected thousands of views. The band’s social pages have picked up followers from several countries. Last month’s show sold well, and the ticketing company scanned hundreds of people through the door. By every visible measure, something seems to be happening. Then the artist asks a question that makes the whole celebration go strangely quiet: Who are these people? The artist does not mean their average age, their general location, or which playlist delivered the most streams. They want to know which people came to the show, bought the shirt, played the album more than once, or might buy a ticket when the band returns. They want to know who prefers vinyl, who might join a membership, who would attend a house concert, who needs a producer, who might book a private show, and who has already supported the music three or four times. The artist usually does not know. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Todd Mack For more than 40 years, singer-songwriter, producer, and community-builder Todd Mack has followed the road less traveled, creating a life in music that has taken him across continents, cultures, and unexpected stages. His songs have carried him far beyond the usual club and theater circuit, with performances at the famed Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club, a bomb shelter in Israel, a remote island in Fiji, an olive grove in the West Bank, and the Taichung Jazz Festival in Taiwan. Wherever he has traveled, Mack has used music as a bridge: a way to connect, listen, tell stories, and find common ground. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Ciarán Hodgins Ciarán Hodgins is an emerging Irish blues and rock artist from the northwest of Ireland, fronting The Ciarán Hodgins Band, a high-energy rock and blues power trio based in Ballyshannon, County Donegal. Rooted in the electric tradition of blues-rock, the band brings together raw guitar fire, driving rhythm, and a deep respect for the music that shaped generations of Irish and international rock players. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with The Customers Customers are a guitar-driven rock band originally formed in Los Angeles, California, in 1995 by songwriter and vocalist Ryan Sexton. The group’s story began when a demo of Sexton’s songs made its way to Elliot Roberts, Neil Young’s longtime manager, who was then helping launch Young’s label, Vapor Records. Roberts heard promise in the songs and asked whether Sexton could put together a band to bring the material to life. From that opportunity, Customers were born. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Arrangement Before Mixing: Fix It in the Song, Not the Plugin Welcome to the Plugin Pileup You press Play. The drums sound powerful. The bass sounds huge. The guitars und like a choir descending from the heavens with excellent credit. There is only one small problem. You cannot hear the song. The lead vocal is buried. The bass and kick drum are wrestling in a dark basement. Three guitar parts are fighting over the same few notes. A giant keyboard pad stretches from one end of the frequency range to the other. The background singers are performing as if they have just staged a successful coup. So you do what many home-studio producers do. You open an equalizer. Then a compressor. Then another equalizer because the first equalizer clearly did not understand the assignment. Then a stereo widener. Then a saturation plugin. Then a masking tool. Then something with a glowing tube graphic and the word “vintage” in its name. Two hours later, the mix is louder, wider, brighter, warmer, more exciting, and somehow even harder to understand. This is often the moment when the artist decides the problem must be a lack of expensive plugins. It probably is not. Many mixing problems begin before mixing. They begin while the parts are being written, chosen, performed, layered, and recorded. They begin when every instrument is given permission to play all the time. They begin when a guitar, piano, synthesizer, bass, and vocal are all placed in the same musical range. They begin when the verse is already at full power, leaving the chorus with nowhere to go except slightly louder and perhaps wearing a hat. The hard truth is also good news. You may not need another plugin. You may need a better arrangement. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - How AI Can Turn One Song Into a 30-Day Marketing Plan Your Song Is More Than One Release-Day Post Independent artists are often told that they need more content. More videos. More posts. More stories. More emails. More reels. More reasons to dance in front of a phone while pointing at words floating over their heads. The pressure never stops. The problem is not that artists have nothing to say. The problem is that most artists do not have a system for turning what they have already created into a steady flow of useful stories, fan conversations, and income opportunities. A song may take months to write, record, mix, master, and release. Then the artist posts the cover art, drops a streaming link, asks everyone to listen, and moves on three days later because the algorithm has already developed the attention span of a caffeinated squirrel. That is a terrible return on the time, money, and emotion that went into the music. One song can support a full month of marketing without the artist repeating the same sales pitch thirty times. The song contains lyrics, emotions, production choices, personal stories, visual ideas, fan questions, live-performance moments, merchandise ideas, video clips, and reasons for people to join the artist’s journey. Artificial intelligence can help uncover those pieces. It can organize them, rewrite them for different platforms, create variations, suggest visuals, draft emails, outline reels, and build a working calendar. But AI should not become the artist. The artist supplies the truth, personality, music, feelings, and point of view. AI helps turn that raw material into a usable plan. Think of it as a fast assistant who never gets tired, but occasionally says something ridiculous with complete confidence. You still need to be the boss. Most important, the goal of this campaign is not simply to create thirty days of social media activity. Social media should be the doorway. The artist’s own website, email list, store, fan community, and permission-based fan system should be the destination. A like is nice. A direct relationship is better. A view may disappear into a platform report. An email signup, direct purchase, ticket buyer, Fan Passport follow, or membership can become part of the artist’s real business. That is how one song starts doing more than collecting streams. It begins building the music industry middle class. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Fan Data Is the New Currency of the Music Industry—and Why Are Artists Still Broke The Gold Rush Nobody Told the Artist About Every time a fan streams a song, skips a song, saves an album, watches a video, buys a ticket, clicks an advertisement, follows an artist, visits a website, or abandons a shopping cart, something valuable is created. Data. That data may reveal where the fan lives, what music they enjoy, which device they use, when they listen, what they buy, how much they spend, which advertisement caught their attention, and what action they are likely to take next. The modern music industry runs on this information. Streaming services use it to recommend songs. Social networks use it to decide which posts appear in a feed. Advertisers use it to target possible customers. Ticketing companies use it to promote future events. Record labels use it to decide where to spend marketing money. Everyone appears to understand the value of fan data except the person who created the reason for that data to exist. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Breakthrough Myth Has a Cash-Flow Problem A viral moment can make an artist look successful. A durable mix of shows, merch, direct sales, publishing, licensing, fan support, and useful technology can help an artist stay successful. Week One of The Artist-Owned Middle Class replaces the lottery-ticket version of the music business with a system working artists can actually build. The Music Business Still Sells Lottery Tickets The music business loves a breakthrough story. It is simple, dramatic, and easy to sell. An unknown artist uploads a song, the right person hears it, the algorithm catches fire, the crowd arrives, and life changes before lunch. Roll the credits. Somebody call the documentary crew. There is only one small problem with this story: it skips the part where a career has to pay its bills. Attention is not a checking account. A packed comment section cannot pay for a van repair. A playlist placement does not automatically create a merch customer. A huge view count may look wonderful in a screenshot while the artist is still moving money from a day job to cover rehearsal space. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Brigitte Purdy Brigitte Rios Purdy is a Los Angeles-born singer and songwriter whose voice carries the warmth of classic soul, the emotional depth of the blues, and the smooth elegance of R&B. From an early age, Purdy understood that singing was more than simply having a gifted voice. For her, music became a way to translate inner feeling into sound, turning personal emotion into songs that connect with listeners on a deeply human level. Raised in Los Angeles, Brigitte was drawn to the power and honesty of soul, blues, and rhythm and blues. Her pure, silky vocal tone quickly set her apart, earning her opportunities to perform alongside respected artists including Walter Trout, Sugaray Rayford, Tim Bogert, Dionne Warwick, and Dolly Parton. She has also contributed background vocals for major artists such as The Who and Paul Rodgers, experiences that placed her in the company of some of rock, soul, and blues music’s most recognizable names. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Stone James of Hollis Dorian Hollis Dorian is an award-winning country singer-songwriter whose music blends country roots with rock and pop energy. His sound is built on strong hooks, honest storytelling, and a modern country edge that reflects the wide range of influences that shaped him. The title track from his debut EP, Country By Birthright, earned major recognition at the 2023 Josie Music Awards in Nashville, winning Country Song of the Year (Multiple Writers). Hollis accepted the award while standing inside the legendary Opry Circle at the Grand Ole Opry House, a milestone moment that marked an important step forward in his career. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Using AI Tools to Improve Your Mix Without Letting AI Take Over The New Home Studio Problem The home studio has changed everything for the independent artist. That little room in the house, the spare bedroom, the basement corner, the treated garage, or the desk with a laptop and a pair of headphones is no longer just a demo space. It is where songs are written, arranged, recorded, mixed, mastered, pitched, released, and sometimes turned into real income. That is powerful. It is also a lot of pressure. A working indie artist today is expected to be the songwriter, performer, producer, engineer, content creator, marketer, booking department, merch department, and sometimes the van driver. Somewhere in the middle of all that, they are also supposed to make a mix that sounds good on studio monitors, earbuds, car speakers, phones, laptops, club PAs, streaming platforms, radio shows, sync pitches, and the merch table after the gig. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - How To Use AI To Write Better Email Subject Lines For Fans The First Line Is The Front Door Every indie artist knows the feeling. You have a show coming up, a new single dropping, a fresh batch of shirts on the merch table, or a membership offer you finally got the nerve to launch. You write the email. You care about the email. You know the people on that list are not strangers. They are fans, friends, buyers, believers, and maybe a few people who signed up three years ago at a gig and forgot they did. Then you get to the subject line and freeze. That tiny line suddenly feels bigger than the song. The subject line is not the whole email, but it is the front door. If it feels fake, fans walk past it. If it feels boring, they miss something they might have cared about. If it feels like a desperate ad, they delete it. If it sounds like you, gives them a real reason to open, and respects their time, you have a much better shot. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - How To Build A Simple Artist CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Without Getting Overwhelmed The Fan List Is Not The Boring Part Somewhere along the way, independent artists were tricked into thinking the “business side” of music was a separate, joyless dungeon where creativity goes to die under a pile of spreadsheets. The myth says the real artist writes songs, plays shows, makes records, and posts into the algorithmic void while some mysterious business goblin with a laptop handles the rest. That myth has been very useful for platforms, labels, middlemen, and anyone else who benefits when artists stay disorganized. The truth is much simpler and much more dangerous to the old system. Your fan list is not the boring part. Your fan list is the beginning of your independent music business. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with The Silverteens The Silverteens are a Minneapolis band with deep roots in the city’s rock, punk, new wave, and power pop history. Long known for an eclectic live set that pulls from obscure 1960s garage rock, late 1970s punk, power pop, and other high-energy corners of rock and roll, the band brings together musicians who have been active in the local scene since the 1970s and 1980s. What gives The Silverteens their character is not just their song selection, but the history behind the players. Each member carries decades of experience from Minneapolis clubs, original bands, cover projects, and the underground music community that helped shape the city’s identity. Their sound reflects that background: raw but tuneful, loose in the right places, sharp when it counts, and rooted in the joy of playing songs that still have electricity in them. http://www.makingascene.org