Making a Scene Presents

Making a Scene Presents - Your Song Is Registered. But Is It Getting Paid? AI Uncovers a Hidden Problem in Music Royalties An AI investigation found recordings by Fleetwood Mac, Michael Jackson, and other legendary artists connected to the wrong musical compositions. If some of the biggest catalogs in music have questionable data, what does that mean for independent musicians who have no army of l...

Making a Scene Presents - You Built Your Own Artist Website. Does Facebook Think It Can Use What's On It? Meta's proposed business terms have sparked a fight over website scraping, artificial intelligence, and copyright. For independent musicians, the bigger question is whether using social media to promote your music should give a technology company new permissions over the creative work you own....

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with BEV BEV is a Minneapolis-based indie rock and power-pop project led by singer-songwriter and guitarist Niki Beverly, whose music moves between moody introspection, melodic guitar pop, and the restless energy of ’90s alternative rock. Built around swirling guitars, engaging rhythms, intricate harmonies, and emotionally direct lyrics, BEV creates songs that...

Making a Scene Brings you Gerry Casey's Interview with Ashesh Dangol Ashesh Dangol, widely known as the “Himalayan Hendrix,” is a Nepali blues-rock guitarist, singer, songwriter, and bandleader whose music fuses traditional blues feeling with psychedelic rock, Eastern influences, and the restless energy of a player who has spent decades pushing the genre beyond familiar borders. http://www.makinga...

Making a Scene Presents - The Most Valuable Thing You Take Home From a Show Might Not Be the Money at the Door Why a $27 million investment in live-event marketing should change how independent artists think about touring, fan relationships, and building a sustainable music career. The Most Expensive Thing You Can Leave Behind at a Gig Picture a familiar Saturday night. You're playing a packed lit...

Making a Scene Presents - Stop Selling Things to Your Fans. Start Building Things With Them. How fan-created merchandise, shared ownership, AI-powered creativity, and a new approach to artist-approved businesses could turn an independent musician's audience into a community of entrepreneurs. What If Your Next Great Merchandise Idea Comes From Your Audience? Somewhere in America, an independent mus...

Making a Scene Presents - You Own Your Masters. So Why Can Someone Else Make Your Music Disappear? The DistroKid and Universal Music Group dispute exposes a dangerous weakness in the independent music business. Artists fought for the right to own their recordings, but owning the music means surprisingly little when someone else controls access to the audience. It's time to rethink what artist inde...

Making a Scene Brings You Gerry Casey's Interview with Chris Vincent Chris Vincent is an award-winning singer-songwriter and slide guitarist based in New Orleans, Louisiana, a city he often describes as both home and muse. Its rhythms, history, contradictions, and restless creative energy run through his music, giving his songs a sense of place without ever confining them to one tradition. http://...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Sunjay Sunjay’s tenth studio album, Split The Sheets, brings a long creative journey full circle. It follows Black & Blues Revisited (2022) and the critically acclaimed Chris Smither tribute I’m Just Like You (2024), two records that looked closely at the music, writers, and traditions that helped shape him as an artist. Split The Sheets completes that...

Making a Scene Presents - Your Music Catalog Is Becoming a Financial Asset. Here's How to Use It Without Selling Your Masters. The music business is discovering that a catalog can be more than a collection of recordings. It can become a source of funding, financial independence, and long-term opportunity. But as companies like Pipeline build a new market around music royalties, the question is whe...

Making a Scene Presents - The Music Industry Has Been Collecting Royalties. But Does It Know What Songs Are Actually Being Played? New research from Britain's grassroots music venues raises troubling questions about how live-performance royalties are measured, who gets paid, and whether the next generation of music technology could finally give independent songwriters a more accurate accounting. T...

Making a Scene Presents - When the Streams Lie: Washington Is Finally Looking at the Real Cost of Music Streaming Fraud The Federal Government Is Asking a Question Independent Artists Should Help Answer For years, streaming fraud has been discussed as though it were mostly an accounting problem involving robots, suspicious playlists and fractions of pennies that somehow escaped from a giant royalt...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Heather Ann Lomax Heather Anne Lomax is an Americana, rock, country-rock, blues, and soul artist whose music is built on emotional honesty, lived experience, and a deep connection to the traditions that shaped American roots music. Originally from Kansas City, she has spent the past decade carving out a sound that feels both timeless and unmistakably perso...

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's interview with Dustin Arbuckle Dustin Arbuckle and The Damnations are not a band you can easily associate with one specific genre, and that's how they planned it. Arbuckle, a veteran of the progressive roots music scene whose singing and harmonica playing first came into prominence in Moreland & Arbuckle, has been kicking up fresh dust with The Damnat...

Making a Scene Presents - Proximity Effect and Vocal Tone: How a Few Inches Can Change Everything About Your Voice Understanding the relationship between microphone distance, bass response, vocal intimacy, and recording quality can help independent musicians make better recordings without spending another dime on equipment. The Most Overlooked Tone Control in Your Home Studio There is a particular...

Making a Scene Presents - The Smart Tour Starts at Home: Building a Local Music Scene and a Regional Touring Business That Actually Makes Money Why independent artists should stop measuring success by miles traveled and start building a music economy in their own backyard. The Great American Touring Myth Somewhere along the way, the music industry convinced independent musicians that success was m...

Making a Scene Presents - The Next Music Industry Middle Class Will Be Built Around Relationships That Survive the Platform The music industry has become remarkably good at collecting information about fans, tracking transactions, and creating new ways to sell music. Unfortunately, the people making the music are often the last ones allowed to benefit from all that information. As AI, Smart Media,...

Making a Scene Presents - The American Music Tourism Act Is Now Law. Indie Artists Should Pay Attention to What Happens Next Washington Has Officially Discovered That Music Makes People Travel On October 9, 2026, President Donald Trump signed the American Music Tourism Act of 2025 into federal law. That sentence sounds like the sort of thing that normally causes musicians to politely nod, return t...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Reverend Raven A musician is only as good as the last gig, and a career is measured less by a list of names than by the people in the room, the groove onstage, and whether the audience leaves smiling. Still, the story is worth telling. Born and raised in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, Chief Raven found the blues in 1971 after seeing Fr...

Making a Scene Presents - 25 Smart Media Products You Can Actually Build for Your Merch Table How to Turn Ordinary Merch Into Physical-Digital Collectibles Without Setting Fire to the Tour Budget The first generation of Smart Media Albums has arrived, and now comes the much more interesting question: what can an independent artist actually make with this stuff? That question matters because nobody...

Making a Scene Presents - The Album Is Not the Object Anymore How Indie Artists Can Turn Almost Anything Into a Smart Media Collectible For most of the recorded music business, the album had a fairly simple job description. It was the thing that contained the music. You bought the vinyl record, cassette or CD because that was how you got the songs, and the artwork, photographs and liner notes came...

Making a Scene Presents - We Solved Music Distribution. We Forgot to Solve Making a Living. There was a time when one of the biggest problems facing an independent musician was simply getting a record into the marketplace. You could make a great album, spend money you probably didn't have recording it, press a few hundred CDs, load the boxes into your car and then discover that most of the record...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Wren and Wilde Wren + Wilde is a Minnesota folk and Americana band led by singer-songwriter Hilary Yoder, whose distinctive “smoke folk” sound blends emotional honesty, roots-driven songwriting, and a dark, smoldering atmosphere that sets the group apart within the Midwest music scene. At the heart of Wren + Wilde is a deep respect for storytelling. Their...

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Jason Reilly Owner of Jamboja Studios Jason Reilly is an Irish musician, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and studio owner whose work sits at the intersection of performance, recording, and artist development. Based in Castleblayney, County Monaghan, Reilly is closely associated with Jamboja Studios, a private residential recording facility cr...

Making a Scene Presents - Great Performances Beat Great Equipment Spend enough time around recording musicians and you eventually witness a familiar little ceremony. Someone finishes a take, listens to the playback, makes a face normally associated with discovering something unpleasant in the refrigerator, and decides the studio needs an upgrade. Perhaps the microphone is not expensive enough. May...