Bobby Owsinski's Inner Circle Podcast

The latest music business and production news. For independent musicians: AI copyright lawsuits, royalty disputes, and changing listener habits are reshaping the music industry right now. Bobby covers US recorded music revenue hitting $6 billion in the first half of the year, with CDs up 59%.  He also explains what a San Jose Sharks arena crowd rejecting an AI goal song tells independent artists....

How does an indie band from Chicago afford to record at the legendary Abbey Road Studios? You record live, of course. In this episode, producer Dan McCormick explains exactly what it takes to record a live album at Abbey Road with no overdubs. McCormick flew to London three weeks after his second son was born to produce The Empty Pockets in Abbey Road Studio 2. The indie band had spent nearly a ye...

Soundproof studio costs, common mistakes, and overlooked questions: acoustic designer Wilson Harwood tells musicians what building one actually takes. An artist himself with a need for a personal studio, he first built his own 270-square-foot backyard studio in 2020. Wilson found he loved the work and the process, which eventually grew into a full design firm. He explains why soundproofing and aco...

Nashville songwriter and producer Don Miggs explains how he built a career connecting legacy artists to the music that made them great. Miggs details how he brokered the relationships that landed him as a producer on a new "Let It Be" with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Mick Fleetwood, and Dolly Parton. He also unpacks why legacy artists need someone to remember what made them good. Bobby...

Star Wars sound designers and audio post pros: Nick Peck breaks down how a veteran actually builds iconic effects from field recording to final mix. Nick has worked on hundreds of Star Wars projects since 1998, including serving as Audio Director on Star Wars Battlefront. In this episode, he explains why he moved from a Sound Devices 722 to a Zoom H4N, how Soundminer Radium allows him to perform s...

Michael Morgan, a Mixing Business Coach with a background in product development, research, and audio-industry brand work, joins Bobby Owsinski to explore why building a sustainable mixing career requires a clear business system, not just great technical skills or the latest marketing tactic. He explains why mixers often struggle when they stop doing the activities that originally generated opport...

Music producers and engineers navigating rapid changes in recording technology learn from veteran producer, engineer, and Grammy nominee Bruce Sugar why staying relevant means embracing new tools without sacrificing the feel and emotion that make music connect. Bruce shares how a short engineering gig with Ringo Starr became a working relationship spanning more than two decades, how artists like R...

Bobby Owsinski, author and host of Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle, breaks down how shifting ownership, AI adoption, and changing platform policies are reshaping the music business and professional audio landscape. Bobby examines major industry moves involving iZotope, Plugin Alliance, Native Instruments, Dynaudio, and DistroKid, alongside the Hollywood Bowl’s immersive sound upgrade and D’Addario’s...

Tour management can burn through an artist’s budget fast when logistics replace leadership, and Ryan Goldbacher, a tour manager and front-of-house engineer, explains what the job actually demands when an artist’s money, crew, and reputation are on the line. Ryan traces his path from Blackbird and Dark Horse Recording, including setting up microphones for a young Taylor Swift in 2006, to Shooter Je...

Reliable music data is getting harder to access, and Oskar Eichler explains why the artists and companies that know how to interpret it now have a serious advantage. As CEO of Songstats, Oskar has helped build a real-time music analytics platform that tracks streaming, playlist, chart, radio, and social media performance across major platforms. Songstats now serves 10,000 active artists and provid...

Indie plugin developers who want to launch a genuinely new synthesis tool will recognize their own blind spots in Evan Mezeske's story. Indie plugin developers who want to launch a genuinely new synthesis tool will recognize their own blind spots in Evan Mezeske's story. Evan left Google after 11 years building large-scale fraud systems to create Anukari, the first commercially available...

Audio plugin developers who assume machine learning is the right tool will find the process used by Hannes Andersson and the team at Oeksound genuinely surprising. Andersson is CEO of Oeksound, the creator of Soothe, the dynamic resonance suppressor that became so dominant on Spotify's Top 50, yet it's team rebuilt the algorithm from scratch.  Oeksound's secret is two people in a ro...

Song copyright protection for musicians who record ideas with a voice memo at 3am proves nothing in a dispute. That original moment completely unverifiable.   Nadim Rahman built Songproof, a dual-blockchain platform, after recognising that musicians needed an irrefutable timestamp at the exact moment inspiration strikes, not after the fact.  For 99 cents per song, Songproof issues what Rahman call...

Music industry professionals still betting on major labels to develop artists should know the system has structurally exited that business.  On this week's episode I break down the data showing how UMG and WMG now redirect spending toward catalog acquisitions rather than new careers. . .  . . . have made AI licensing deals explicitly designed to reduce artist relationships. . . . . . and then...

Independent musicians sometimes upload masters that are too hot, so they lose transient detail the moment streaming platforms apply loudness normalization. Mastering engineer Jeff Graves spent two and a half years measuring 214 audio fingerprints across 15 samples per genre to build a 24-stage AI mastering platform, and in this conversation he explains exactly why delivering at the target LUFS lev...

On this week's episode, session vocalist Darlene Koldenhoven tells us how her music hit #4 on the Billboard classical crossover chart with no manager or label. The common assumption that a major-label infrastructure is required to chart is exactly what her story dismantles, and she walks through the specific decisions that produced number-one worldwide radio chart results as an independent ar...

Music career longevity is what separates artists who last from those who burn out chasing the wrong metrics. Too many aspiring musicians hand control to social platforms, grinding out content as servants to algorithms while the industry gaslights them with success measures that have nothing to do with real longevity. Keith Jopling spent 25 years inside the business, including time at Spotify, then...

On this week's episode, Bobby speaks with Dr. Bill Evans, audio scientist, producer, educator, and inventor of the Performance Restoration methodology. Bill believes that drum recording has always involved a painful tradeoff, but it doesn't have to. Most engineers accept mic bleed as an unavoidable character of a drum sound, questioning whether removing it could actually alter the drumme...

Female artists who hire producers risk losing creative control before a single song is released. On this week's podcast episode , Xylo Aria , founder of Music Production for Women (MPW), tells us how she learned this the hard way, by paying for sessions where male producers overrode her vision, leaving her with music she never put out and studios where personal safety competed with creative f...

On this week's episode, Elliot Easton, guitarist for The Cars and Creedence Clearwater Revisited, takes us through his journey with the band and beyond. Easton looks back at The Cars' origins, from getting a label deal the old fashioned way, to connecting with famed producer Roy Thomas Baker, to recording the band's initial albums, to how his many influences shaped his solos in the...

Music business professionals who still see major labels as career partners need to hear what Bobby Owsinski lays out plainly: Universal Music Group's pursuit of a $3 billion Spotify stock sell-off signals that labels have shifted from artist development engines into financial instruments that happen to license music.  The failure mode is assuming the label is on your side when, as Bobby expla...

What matters more in the music business, mastering every plugin, or becoming the kind of person people want to hire again? On this episode of Bobby Owsinski's Inner Circle Podcast, Bobby talks with songwriter, producer, engineer, and educator Gary Gray about music licensing, post production, rhythmic integrity, AI, immersive audio, and the character traits that keep people working in a changi...

What can a 1956 recording console teach us about the future of music production? In this episode of Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle Podcast, Bobby talks with Tom Camuso, Director of Engineering at The Les Paul Recording Studio, and Michael Braunstein, 3rd Generation Les Paul Manager. They discuss the newly restored Les Paul Recording Studio in Los Angeles, Les Paul’s groundbreaking recording innovat...

What makes a compressor become one of the most trusted pieces of gear in modern recording studios? In this episode of Bobby Owsinski's Inner Circle Podcast, Bobby talks with Dave Derr, founder of Empirical Labs and creator of the legendary Distressor. Dave shares the story behind the Distressor’s development, including how early studio challenges, dead drum sounds, 1176 experiments, and real-...

What does it really take to turn a good voice into a sustainable music career? In this episode of Bobby Owsinski's Inner Circle, Bobby talks with vocal coach, singer, songwriter, and artist developer Patrice Peris about the voice, the business, and the habits that help independent artists move from practice room to real performance. Patrice shares why today’s singers need more than technique,...