Making a Scene Presents

Making a Scene Presents - Decentralized Touring & Ticketing: Taking Control of Live Revenue If you’re an independent artist, you already know the truth. Touring is the lifeline. It’s the one place where you can still earn real money, meet real fans, and feel like you have a shot at building something that actually belongs to you. But the moment you step onto the traditional touring path, you slam...

Making a Scene Presents - How to Use AI Art to Build a Visual Brand Fans Remember How indie artists can use Midjourney, Ideogram, and Leonardo.ai to create a powerful, consistent visual world When people talk about branding in the music industry, it usually sounds like something only major labels can afford. Big agencies. Big budgets. Big teams deciding what your album art should look like or what...

Making a Scene Presents - The American Music Fairness Act: What It Really Means for Indie Artists in a World Where Radio Isn’t King Anymore For years the music business has danced around the same old question. Who gets paid when radio spins a song? If you think the artist gets a piece of that pie, you’re giving the system more credit than it deserves. The truth is, in the United States, the perfor...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with American Mile American Mile isn’t just a band. They’re a touring machine, a modern voice for Southern rock, and storytellers for the real American struggle. Built on pure road-warrior grit, the band is carrying Southern rock forward with a sound that’s loud, raw, and impossible to ignore. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Claudia Cane Claudia Cane has been a force in the music scene for almost 25 years. German audiences first got to know her as the voice behind several SAT.1 TV theme songs, including the tracks for Benzin im Blut with Sonja Kirchberger, 36 Stunden Angst, and Die rote Meile. Her distinctive, raspy voice stood out right away. After spending five ye...

Making a Scene Presents - The Secret Power of Sidechains: How They Shape Modern Mixes If you’ve ever looked at a compressor or a gate and wondered what the little “Sidechain” button does, you’re not alone. Most beginners skip right past it because it looks like something made for scientists, not indie musicians working in a home studio. But the truth is simple. A sidechain is just a way to let one...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Paul Filipowicz He has been playing the blues for more than 40 years, all while working full-time in construction and roofing to make a living. This year, worn-out knees and elbows finally pushed him into retirement from the heavy labor. Even so, he hasn’t slowed down. He’s now building a cabin near Tomahawk using timber he harvested from his own 70-acre p...

Making a Scene Presents - What Is Latency? And How to Record Without Losing Your Groove Written for indie musicians who just want their tracks to sound right without fighting their gear If you’ve ever tried to record vocals or guitar and felt like your timing was weird, or you couldn’t stay in the pocket no matter how hard you focused, you’ve already met the enemy. That enemy is latency. Latency i...

Making a Scene Presents - Turning One song Into 30 Pieces of AI-Generated Content How Indie Artists Can Turn a Single Track into a Month of Promotion The New Reality: One Song Isn’t Enough Anymore If you’re an indie artist trying to grow your fanbase today, you’ve probably already felt the pressure. You drop a song, you post about it once or twice, and the whole thing sinks into the feed like a st...

Making a Scene Presents - Touring 2035: Why Your Next Fanbase Will Come From a Wallet, Not a ZIP Code The touring world you know is collapsing. That old-school strategy of drawing lines on a map, circling major cities, and hoping enough people show up to cover gas is fading fast. For decades, touring was built on guesswork and geography. But the next era of touring won’t be about cities at all. It...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Kamel L King Entertainment Lawyer and Artist Management Kamel L. King was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. He studied at American University in Washington, D.C., before returning home to attend Tougaloo College, where he graduated with honors and earned a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations. He later received his law...

Making a Scene Presents - Why Web3 Touring Collectives Will Replace Booking Agents How Indie Artists Can Use DAOs, Fan-Powered Ticketing, and Community Spaces to Build Tours Without Gatekeepers The music industry likes to pretend that touring is some kind of secret science only insiders understand. Booking agents act like they hold magic keys. Venues act like they own every path to a stage. Promot...

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Pierre Lacocque of Mississippi Heat! On the back cover of Mississippi Heat’s album Footprints On the Ceiling, there’s a photo of a man playing harmonica with such intensity you can almost hear the music in the silence of the still image. That man is Pierre Lacocque—the band’s founder, bandleader, and principal songwriter. What that photo suggest...

Making a Scene Presents - How to Use ChatGPT to Analyze Your Mix and Make It Better The New Secret Weapon for Indie Artists Mixing at Home Mixing your music at home shouldn’t feel like guesswork. But most indie artists know the feeling. You sit in front of your speakers, you start turning knobs, and you hope for the best. Some days everything sounds muddy. Other days your vocals feel harsh and thi...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Pops Fletcher My story starts at age thirteen in the Roosevelt Jr. High auditorium. Three of us stood onstage with acoustic guitars, blinded by a single follow spot, singing “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I didn’t realize it then, but folk music was the doorway that pulled me into a lifetime of performing. http://www.makingascene.org

Making A Scene Is Moving Toward a 100% Ad-Free, User-Supported Future For more than a decade, Making A Scene has been showing up every single day for the indie music world. We have published fresh content every single day for over 10 years straight. No breaks. No missed days. No excuses. Every sunrise brings new interviews, new reviews, new gear talk, new music business guides, and new tools to he...

Making a Scene Presents - AI Isn’t Replacing Musicians—It’s Replacing the Music Industry Middlemen There’s a strange truth hiding in plain sight in the music world right now, and the only people who seem scared of it are the ones who have the most to lose. If you listen to big labels, legacy execs, and certain industry talking heads, they want you to believe that AI is coming after the artists. Th...

Making a Scene Presents - Emotion-Driven Mixing: How AI Reads Feelings to Shape the Sound There’s a quiet revolution happening in the studio, and it has nothing to do with new mics or fancy compressors. It’s about something deeper. For the first time ever, we have AI tools that can actually read the emotional tone of music. Not just the key, tempo, or waveform shape. I’m talking about mood, feelin...

Making a Scene Presents - AI-Powered Music Ads: Smarter Targeting, Better Results When you hear people talk about AI in music marketing, it usually sounds like a bunch of tech hype. But the truth is actually much simpler. AI has changed ads on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok in a way that finally helps indie musicians reach real fans without wasting money. You no longer have to sit there trying to...

Making a Scene Presents - Warner Music Signs Deal with Suno.com and Ends it's Lawsuit So… What Happened? Last week, Warner Music Group (WMG) announced it had settled its copyright lawsuit against Suno. That lawsuit was one of several filed by major labels in 2024 and 2025, accusing AI music generators like Suno (and its rival Udio) of using copyrighted recordings — without permission — to train th...

Making a Scene Presents - Music Metadata on the Blockchain: Fixing a Broken System The music industry has a weird problem that nobody outside the business talks about. It’s not streaming payouts. It’s not labels taking too much money. It’s something way more basic, almost embarrassing when you think about it. The whole industry still runs on broken metadata. Metadata is the simple information abou...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Roy Blumenfeld of The Blues Project Roy Blumenfeld has lived at the center of some of the most electrifying moments in New York’s 1960s music revolution. Born in the Bronx in 1944, he came of age just as American rock and roll was taking shape. Drawn early to the sounds of blues, R&B, and jazz, he picked up the drums and quickly became part of the city’s v...

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Rebecca Downes Birmingham-based singer, songwriter, and independent artist Rebecca Downes has spent more than a decade building one of the most respected reputations in modern blues-rock. Working closely with longtime co-writer and multi-instrumentalist Steve Birkett, she releases all her music on her own label Mad Hat Records—a fully self-susta...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Larin Michaels Born and raised in the heart of Motown, Larin Michaels grew up surrounded by one of the world’s greatest music traditions. He began his musical journey at just seven years old as a drummer, laying the foundation for a lifelong career shaped by rhythm, soul, and unmistakable Detroit grit. By fifteen, Larin had expanded his musical palette to...

Making a Scene Presents - The Last Great Land Grab: How Web3 Will Decide Who Owns the Next Music Economy The music industry is going through one of the biggest power shifts in its history, and most artists don’t even realize it yet. The shift isn’t happening in the headlines. It’s happening underneath everything, in the code, in the way money moves, in the way fans connect, and in the way ownershi...