Making a Scene Presents

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...

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...