Making a Scene Presents

Making a Scene Presents - You Finished the Record Now Build the Smart Media Album A Making a Scene Practical Guide to Turning a Finished Album Into a Physical-Digital Product Fans Can Buy, Tap, Keep and Come Back To In our previous Making a Scene feature on Smart Media Albums, we looked at why this emerging physical-digital format could become important for independent artists. Luminate has now re...

Making a Scene Presents - You Can Hold Music Again: How Smart Media Could Reconnect a Digital Generation With the Album For most of recorded music history, loving music meant touching it. You walked into a record store, flipped through rows of albums, picked one up, studied the cover, carried it home, broke the seal and spent time with the object before the first song ever reached your ears. The m...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with JP Soars JP Soars has spent more than two decades building his reputation the way roots music was meant to be built: onstage, night after night, with a guitar in his hands and a road-tested sound that refuses to stay politely inside one genre. A fiery guitarist, soulful singer, and inventive songwriter, Soars moves through blues, rock and roll, Latin rhyth...

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Sujata Sujata is a British-Indian singer and songwriter based in London. Raised in Calcutta by her musical family and steeped in the Bengali Folk Music tradition, her focus moved to Pop and Rock soon after she settled in England. Inspired by Janis Joplin, Dolly Parton, Aretha Franklin, George Harrison and her own cross-cultural upbringing, Sujat...

Making a Scene Presents - Harmonics Without the Math: What “Warmth,” Saturation, Tubes and Transformers Are Really Doing to Your Music Walk through enough recording studios and eventually somebody will tell you that a microphone preamp sounds warm because it has tubes, another sounds punchy because it has transformers, and a plug-in sounds analog because it adds harmonics. Give the conversation an...

Making a Scene Presents - You Own the Music. But Who Owns the Pipes? For most of the modern independent music movement, we have spent a lot of time telling artists to own their masters, control their publishing, keep their copyrights, and avoid signing contracts that turn a lifetime of creative work into somebody else’s asset. That advice still matters because ownership is the foundation of almost...

Making a Scene Presents - Your Studio Has New Landlords: Native Instruments, iZotope and the Price of Trusting an Ecosystem There are few relationships in modern music more intimate than the one between a producer and a piece of software that has been sitting inside every session for ten years. We may pretend plugins are tools in the same way a screwdriver is a tool, but nobody has ever opened an...

Making a Scene Presents - Washington Just Changed the AI Music Fight If AI Training Becomes Fair Use, Independent Artists Need a Bigger Rights Strategy For the last several years, the music business has been circling one giant question about artificial intelligence: whether AI companies should have to pay for the copyrighted music they use to train their models. That debate has attracted artists,...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Donna Herula Donna Herula is an award-winning blues singer, songwriter, resonator slide guitarist, bandleader, educator, and Chicago Blues Hall of Fame inductee whose music bridges Delta blues, early Chicago blues, folk, soul, gospel, Americana, and New Orleans rhythm. Hailed by Living Blues Magazine for her “superlative guitar prowess,” Herula has built a...

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Michael Christie of The Kings of Cool The Kings of Cool are a Ballyshannon, County Donegal band whose music blends classic guitar pop, soft rock, country, jazz, and the melodic craft of timeless songwriting. Built around Michael Christie, Jason Kelly, and Stephen Gallagher, the band carries the easy chemistry of musicians who have known each oth...

Making a Scene Presents - The Fan, the Brand and the Music Why the Future of an Independent Music Career May Depend Less on Finding More Listeners and More on Building Better Relationships There is something wonderfully strange about the modern music business. An independent artist can sit in a bedroom in Georgia, make a record, distribute it around the world, reach listeners in countries they hav...

Making a Scene Presents - SoundCloud Put the Sale Next to Discovery. That Could Change the Indie Music Business There is something almost delightfully old-fashioned about one of the more interesting music-business announcements of 2026. A fan hears a song, likes the song, decides it is worth a few dollars, gives the artist some money, and receives a copy of the music. After more than two decades o...

Making a Scene Presents - The Labels Aren’t Fighting AI. They’re Buying Into It. So Where Is the Indie Artist’s Equity? For the last few years, independent musicians have been handed a very simple story about artificial intelligence. AI was the thing coming for your songs, your voice, your recording career, your session work and, if the more dramatic headlines were to be believed, possibly the las...

Making a Scene Presents - There Are Humans Inside the WAV File: The AFM AI Lawsuit and the Rights Revolution Independent Artists Should Start Building Now There is a wonderful moment at the end of making a record when all the complicated things that went into it suddenly appear to become simple. The drummer has gone home, the guitar amps are quiet, the background vocals have finally stopped multip...

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, s...

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....

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 so...

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 friend...

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 do...

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 t...

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 somet...

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 pla...

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 ha...

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, c...

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 s...