Making a Scene Presents

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 play...

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...

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...

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 sto...

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 grat...

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...

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 ne...

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. You...

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 am...

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 adver...

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 we...

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 wo...

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.makingascen...

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 authent...

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 app...

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.mak...

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...

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 edi...

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 model...

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 fa...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 i...