Making a Scene Presents

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 energetic live acts, delivering original music with the power of a roadhouse blues band, the swing of a horn-fueled soul revue, and the urgency of rock and roll. http://www.makingascene.org

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 grew up in a musical family. Her father, Jimmy Smyth, led The Arcadians, and Gloria's first taste of show business came early, dancing and playing accordion with the family band. Music was not a hobby waiting politely in the corner. It was part of the household, part of the working life, and part of the world she stepped into as a young performer. http://www.makingascene.org

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 store enormous pieces of that business inside companies they do not control. That arrangement can work beautifully right up until it doesn't. A platform changes its pricing, removes a feature, sells itself, changes its algorithm, modifies its licensing program, restricts an account, changes ownership, decides your favorite feature was apparently not as beloved inside the quarterly earnings meeting as it was inside your business, and suddenly you discover exactly which parts of your career you actually owned. This is why every independent artist should perform what we might call a platform dependency audit. The idea is simple: identify the outside companies your music business cannot comfortably operate without, and then figure out what would happen if one of them vanished tomorrow. Not because every platform is evil. Not because the internet is collapsing. Not because you should unplug your computer, move into a cabin, and begin selling hand-carved CDs to passing hikers. Platforms can be incredibly useful. Some of them are responsible for enormous amounts of discovery, sales, distribution, communication, licensing, ticketing, and creative work. The problem begins when an artist mistakes access to a platform for ownership of a business. Those are two very different things. http://www.makingascene.org

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 gratis, or free, license strategies. Existing licenses already in use remain in force until the end of their terms, but the paid licensing marketplace that creators and rights holders had been learning to use is being phased out. YouTube explains the current transition at https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11273150?hl=en. That does not mean Creator Music itself has vanished, and it does not mean YouTube suddenly stopped caring about music licensing. YouTube's current Creator Music FAQ at https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11610609?hl=en still describes Creator Music as a catalog that can support licensed and revenue-sharing uses depending on the terms attached to a track, even while the rights-holder documentation says paid license strategies are being retired in favor of gratis licensing. The important part for independent artists is not arguing over which button YouTube will move next. It is recognizing what happens when a useful business function lives inside somebody else's platform. A company launches a feature. Artists and rights holders begin building workflows around it. Creators learn how to purchase music through it, catalogs are organized for it, and then the platform changes direction because its business priorities change. That is normal technology-company behavior. It is also one more reason an independent artist should never confuse access to a platform with ownership of a business. http://www.makingascene.org

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 in an eligible monetized video while keeping the normal revenue share from the video. For the music rights holder, the arrangement created something that looked remarkably like a small-scale synchronization licensing marketplace. It was not Hollywood money, and nobody was ordering a new swimming pool because a cooking channel licensed their instrumental, but it created a relatively simple way for music owners and video creators to do business with each other. Now that paid part of Creator Music is going away. http://www.makingascene.org

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 new chapter rooted in the past, but not confined by it. The project is led by original Gabriel Bondage member Rex Bundy and longtime friend, collaborator, and musical partner Rich Reardin. Together, they have created a rebirth that honors the spirit of Gabriel Bondage while opening the door to new songs, new sounds, and a broader creative vision. http://www.makingascene.org

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. Young Rell began playing harmonica and guitar at the age of seven, discovering early that the blues gave him both a language and a lifeline. As a child, he faced personal struggles and trauma, and he found comfort in music born from hardship, resilience, and survival. The blues became more than a style for him. It became a way to understand pain, express emotion, and turn difficult experience into something honest and powerful. http://www.makingascene.org

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 amplifier and record the sound after the amp, speaker, cabinet, air, and room have all changed it. That is the basic difference between DI and microphone recording, but it is not a contest between the “real” method and the “fake” method. Both are real, both have been used on successful records, and both can be either wonderful or awful depending on the player, instrument, song, room, equipment, and decisions being made. For an independent artist, the best method is not always the one that looks most impressive in a studio photo. It is the method that captures the emotion of the performance, fits the production, stays within the budget, and gives the artist enough flexibility to finish the record without creating a technical hostage situation. http://www.makingascene.org

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 advertisement or collects a subscription payment, and sends a small portion of the revenue through the music-rights system. The artist receives a stream count, a royalty report, and perhaps a map showing where the listening took place. Everyone calls this engagement, although the artist usually still has no idea who engaged. http://www.makingascene.org

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 went from selling records to chasing fifteen-second video trends. Yet the Grammys stayed put. That long marriage has now ended. http://www.makingascene.org

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 worst trading day since the company became publicly traded in September 2021. The decline erased approximately $10 billion from the company's market value, based on the exchange rate at the time. http://www.makingascene.org

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.makingascene.org

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 authenticity, consistency, and a lifelong commitment to the music. http://www.makingascene.org

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 appear on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, TikTok, and the rest of the digital neighborhood. The distributor delivers the package. The stores play the music. Royalties eventually trickle back. Everybody goes home. That simple picture is becoming badly outdated. http://www.makingascene.org

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.makingascene.org

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 media post can earn thousands of views and still leave the artist with no useful way to contact the people who watched it. A song can land on a playlist, gain streams, and disappear from the listener's life as soon as the platform serves the next track. A video can go viral while ticket sales remain stubbornly committed to remaining exactly where they were. The problem is not that social media and streaming are useless. They are extremely useful when given the right job. They are doors of discovery. They are not the house. http://www.makingascene.org

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 editorial archive and its genre map, a system designed to connect artists, releases, scenes, and musical communities. SoundCloud also introduced an optional migration process that gives Nina artists a way to move their music, content, and followers into SoundCloud's creator ecosystem. Artists are not being moved automatically. Each artist must decide whether to take part, and the financial terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed. At first glance, this may look like a relatively small technology acquisition. One company closed, a larger company bought some of what remained, and artists were offered a way to move their work. The editorial archive may survive, the genre map may find a new life, and former Nina artists may gain access to a larger creator platform. From a distance, it looks like the music industry version of moving boxes from one apartment to another and hoping none of the cables disappear. But this story raises a much larger and more uncomfortable question for independent musicians. When an artist-friendly platform shuts down, gets acquired, runs out of funding, changes direction, or simply disappears, which parts of an artist's business can actually travel with the artist? Music files may be easy to copy. Artwork may be downloadable. A biography can be pasted into a new profile. Even a follower count may sometimes be carried into another system. The harder issue is whether the business relationship behind those numbers can move too. http://www.makingascene.org

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 models without permission. That is an enormous number of recordings. It is large enough to make the average independent artist stare at their own hard drive, notice three folders named “Old Masters,” and quietly close the laptop. Sony had previously attempted to add 30,442 recordings to the lawsuit it originally brought against Udio in 2024. On July 2, 2026, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein denied that request, leaving the earlier case focused on 333 works that remained in the original action. Sony responded by filing a separate lawsuit covering the additional recordings. Sony says it found the additional works after gaining access to information about Udio's training data during legal discovery. According to Sony's allegations, it then used audio-fingerprinting technology to compare that information with recordings in its catalog. Those words matter: according to Sony's allegations. http://www.makingascene.org

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 faked. http://www.makingascene.org

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, bringing together fiery guitar work, soulful vocals, and songs shaped by experience, craft, and intention. http://www.makingascene.org

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 that feels both nostalgic and futuristic, like a lost dance-floor anthem beamed in from another timeline. http://www.makingascene.org

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 vocal folds. Those folds open and close rapidly. A guitarist plucks a string, causing it to move back and forth. A drummer strikes a drumhead, which bends inward and springs back. A cymbal flexes in many directions at once. A piano hammer hits a string. A loudspeaker cone moves forward and backward. That movement pushes and pulls on the air around it. Air may look like empty space, but it is filled with tiny molecules. When a guitar string moves, it pushes nearby air molecules closer together. Those molecules bump into the next group, which bumps into another group. When the string moves back, it leaves a slightly less crowded area behind it. The result is a traveling pattern of higher and lower pressure. That traveling pressure pattern is a sound wave. http://www.makingascene.org

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 all seem to have been chosen by the same mysterious fellow wearing sunglasses indoors. Now the fan may be able to ask a much better question. “Find me a blues-rock artist from Atlanta with powerful female vocals, strong guitar work, and songs that sound good on a late-night drive.” That is not a normal search. It is a description of a need. The listener is not naming an artist or requesting a song title. The listener is describing a sound, a place, a voice, a mood, and a moment. This is where music discovery is heading. http://www.makingascene.org

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 it, what it helped create, and whether anybody planned to pay them. Now the music business is beginning to move toward a different model. Instead of taking first and arguing about permission later, some companies are trying to build licensed AI systems in which creators can choose whether their work is included. That sounds better. It probably is better. But “better than unpaid scraping” is a pretty low bar. A raccoon with a stolen sandwich could clear it. The real question is not whether AI licensing programs will exist. They are already beginning to appear. The real question is whether independent artists will receive fair payments, useful reports, meaningful control, and enough information to know whether the deal makes sense. There is also another uncomfortable question. When an AI company finally comes looking for licensed music, will the artist be able to prove what they own? http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Music Industry Does Not Have a Fan Problem. It Has a Customer-Ownership Problem An independent artist sits in front of a laptop, staring at numbers that should feel exciting. The new single has passed 100,000 streams. A video has collected thousands of views. The band's social pages have picked up followers from several countries. Last month's show sold well, and the ticketing company scanned hundreds of people through the door. By every visible measure, something seems to be happening. Then the artist asks a question that makes the whole celebration go strangely quiet: Who are these people? The artist does not mean their average age, their general location, or which playlist delivered the most streams. They want to know which people came to the show, bought the shirt, played the album more than once, or might buy a ticket when the band returns. They want to know who prefers vinyl, who might join a membership, who would attend a house concert, who needs a producer, who might book a private show, and who has already supported the music three or four times. The artist usually does not know. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Todd Mack For more than 40 years, singer-songwriter, producer, and community-builder Todd Mack has followed the road less traveled, creating a life in music that has taken him across continents, cultures, and unexpected stages. His songs have carried him far beyond the usual club and theater circuit, with performances at the famed Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club, a bomb shelter in Israel, a remote island in Fiji, an olive grove in the West Bank, and the Taichung Jazz Festival in Taiwan. Wherever he has traveled, Mack has used music as a bridge: a way to connect, listen, tell stories, and find common ground. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Ciarán Hodgins Ciarán Hodgins is an emerging Irish blues and rock artist from the northwest of Ireland, fronting The Ciarán Hodgins Band, a high-energy rock and blues power trio based in Ballyshannon, County Donegal. Rooted in the electric tradition of blues-rock, the band brings together raw guitar fire, driving rhythm, and a deep respect for the music that shaped generations of Irish and international rock players. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with The Customers Customers are a guitar-driven rock band originally formed in Los Angeles, California, in 1995 by songwriter and vocalist Ryan Sexton. The group's story began when a demo of Sexton's songs made its way to Elliot Roberts, Neil Young's longtime manager, who was then helping launch Young's label, Vapor Records. Roberts heard promise in the songs and asked whether Sexton could put together a band to bring the material to life. From that opportunity, Customers were born. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Arrangement Before Mixing: Fix It in the Song, Not the Plugin Welcome to the Plugin Pileup You press Play. The drums sound powerful. The bass sounds huge. The guitars und like a choir descending from the heavens with excellent credit. There is only one small problem. You cannot hear the song. The lead vocal is buried. The bass and kick drum are wrestling in a dark basement. Three guitar parts are fighting over the same few notes. A giant keyboard pad stretches from one end of the frequency range to the other. The background singers are performing as if they have just staged a successful coup. So you do what many home-studio producers do. You open an equalizer. Then a compressor. Then another equalizer because the first equalizer clearly did not understand the assignment. Then a stereo widener. Then a saturation plugin. Then a masking tool. Then something with a glowing tube graphic and the word “vintage” in its name. Two hours later, the mix is louder, wider, brighter, warmer, more exciting, and somehow even harder to understand. This is often the moment when the artist decides the problem must be a lack of expensive plugins. It probably is not. Many mixing problems begin before mixing. They begin while the parts are being written, chosen, performed, layered, and recorded. They begin when every instrument is given permission to play all the time. They begin when a guitar, piano, synthesizer, bass, and vocal are all placed in the same musical range. They begin when the verse is already at full power, leaving the chorus with nowhere to go except slightly louder and perhaps wearing a hat. The hard truth is also good news. You may not need another plugin. You may need a better arrangement. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - How AI Can Turn One Song Into a 30-Day Marketing Plan Your Song Is More Than One Release-Day Post Independent artists are often told that they need more content. More videos. More posts. More stories. More emails. More reels. More reasons to dance in front of a phone while pointing at words floating over their heads. The pressure never stops. The problem is not that artists have nothing to say. The problem is that most artists do not have a system for turning what they have already created into a steady flow of useful stories, fan conversations, and income opportunities. A song may take months to write, record, mix, master, and release. Then the artist posts the cover art, drops a streaming link, asks everyone to listen, and moves on three days later because the algorithm has already developed the attention span of a caffeinated squirrel. That is a terrible return on the time, money, and emotion that went into the music. One song can support a full month of marketing without the artist repeating the same sales pitch thirty times. The song contains lyrics, emotions, production choices, personal stories, visual ideas, fan questions, live-performance moments, merchandise ideas, video clips, and reasons for people to join the artist's journey. Artificial intelligence can help uncover those pieces. It can organize them, rewrite them for different platforms, create variations, suggest visuals, draft emails, outline reels, and build a working calendar. But AI should not become the artist. The artist supplies the truth, personality, music, feelings, and point of view. AI helps turn that raw material into a usable plan. Think of it as a fast assistant who never gets tired, but occasionally says something ridiculous with complete confidence. You still need to be the boss. Most important, the goal of this campaign is not simply to create thirty days of social media activity. Social media should be the doorway. The artist's own website, email list, store, fan community, and permission-based fan system should be the destination. A like is nice. A direct relationship is better. A view may disappear into a platform report. An email signup, direct purchase, ticket buyer, Fan Passport follow, or membership can become part of the artist's real business. That is how one song starts doing more than collecting streams. It begins building the music industry middle class. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Fan Data Is the New Currency of the Music Industry—and Why Are Artists Still Broke The Gold Rush Nobody Told the Artist About Every time a fan streams a song, skips a song, saves an album, watches a video, buys a ticket, clicks an advertisement, follows an artist, visits a website, or abandons a shopping cart, something valuable is created. Data. That data may reveal where the fan lives, what music they enjoy, which device they use, when they listen, what they buy, how much they spend, which advertisement caught their attention, and what action they are likely to take next. The modern music industry runs on this information. Streaming services use it to recommend songs. Social networks use it to decide which posts appear in a feed. Advertisers use it to target possible customers. Ticketing companies use it to promote future events. Record labels use it to decide where to spend marketing money. Everyone appears to understand the value of fan data except the person who created the reason for that data to exist. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Breakthrough Myth Has a Cash-Flow Problem A viral moment can make an artist look successful. A durable mix of shows, merch, direct sales, publishing, licensing, fan support, and useful technology can help an artist stay successful. Week One of The Artist-Owned Middle Class replaces the lottery-ticket version of the music business with a system working artists can actually build. The Music Business Still Sells Lottery Tickets The music business loves a breakthrough story. It is simple, dramatic, and easy to sell. An unknown artist uploads a song, the right person hears it, the algorithm catches fire, the crowd arrives, and life changes before lunch. Roll the credits. Somebody call the documentary crew. There is only one small problem with this story: it skips the part where a career has to pay its bills. Attention is not a checking account. A packed comment section cannot pay for a van repair. A playlist placement does not automatically create a merch customer. A huge view count may look wonderful in a screenshot while the artist is still moving money from a day job to cover rehearsal space. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Brigitte Purdy Brigitte Rios Purdy is a Los Angeles-born singer and songwriter whose voice carries the warmth of classic soul, the emotional depth of the blues, and the smooth elegance of R&B. From an early age, Purdy understood that singing was more than simply having a gifted voice. For her, music became a way to translate inner feeling into sound, turning personal emotion into songs that connect with listeners on a deeply human level. Raised in Los Angeles, Brigitte was drawn to the power and honesty of soul, blues, and rhythm and blues. Her pure, silky vocal tone quickly set her apart, earning her opportunities to perform alongside respected artists including Walter Trout, Sugaray Rayford, Tim Bogert, Dionne Warwick, and Dolly Parton. She has also contributed background vocals for major artists such as The Who and Paul Rodgers, experiences that placed her in the company of some of rock, soul, and blues music's most recognizable names. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Stone James of Hollis Dorian Hollis Dorian is an award-winning country singer-songwriter whose music blends country roots with rock and pop energy. His sound is built on strong hooks, honest storytelling, and a modern country edge that reflects the wide range of influences that shaped him. The title track from his debut EP, Country By Birthright, earned major recognition at the 2023 Josie Music Awards in Nashville, winning Country Song of the Year (Multiple Writers). Hollis accepted the award while standing inside the legendary Opry Circle at the Grand Ole Opry House, a milestone moment that marked an important step forward in his career. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Using AI Tools to Improve Your Mix Without Letting AI Take Over The New Home Studio Problem The home studio has changed everything for the independent artist. That little room in the house, the spare bedroom, the basement corner, the treated garage, or the desk with a laptop and a pair of headphones is no longer just a demo space. It is where songs are written, arranged, recorded, mixed, mastered, pitched, released, and sometimes turned into real income. That is powerful. It is also a lot of pressure. A working indie artist today is expected to be the songwriter, performer, producer, engineer, content creator, marketer, booking department, merch department, and sometimes the van driver. Somewhere in the middle of all that, they are also supposed to make a mix that sounds good on studio monitors, earbuds, car speakers, phones, laptops, club PAs, streaming platforms, radio shows, sync pitches, and the merch table after the gig. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - How To Use AI To Write Better Email Subject Lines For Fans The First Line Is The Front Door Every indie artist knows the feeling. You have a show coming up, a new single dropping, a fresh batch of shirts on the merch table, or a membership offer you finally got the nerve to launch. You write the email. You care about the email. You know the people on that list are not strangers. They are fans, friends, buyers, believers, and maybe a few people who signed up three years ago at a gig and forgot they did. Then you get to the subject line and freeze. That tiny line suddenly feels bigger than the song. The subject line is not the whole email, but it is the front door. If it feels fake, fans walk past it. If it feels boring, they miss something they might have cared about. If it feels like a desperate ad, they delete it. If it sounds like you, gives them a real reason to open, and respects their time, you have a much better shot. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - How To Build A Simple Artist CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Without Getting Overwhelmed The Fan List Is Not The Boring Part Somewhere along the way, independent artists were tricked into thinking the “business side” of music was a separate, joyless dungeon where creativity goes to die under a pile of spreadsheets. The myth says the real artist writes songs, plays shows, makes records, and posts into the algorithmic void while some mysterious business goblin with a laptop handles the rest. That myth has been very useful for platforms, labels, middlemen, and anyone else who benefits when artists stay disorganized. The truth is much simpler and much more dangerous to the old system. Your fan list is not the boring part. Your fan list is the beginning of your independent music business. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with The Silverteens The Silverteens are a Minneapolis band with deep roots in the city's rock, punk, new wave, and power pop history. Long known for an eclectic live set that pulls from obscure 1960s garage rock, late 1970s punk, power pop, and other high-energy corners of rock and roll, the band brings together musicians who have been active in the local scene since the 1970s and 1980s. What gives The Silverteens their character is not just their song selection, but the history behind the players. Each member carries decades of experience from Minneapolis clubs, original bands, cover projects, and the underground music community that helped shape the city's identity. Their sound reflects that background: raw but tuneful, loose in the right places, sharp when it counts, and rooted in the joy of playing songs that still have electricity in them. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Next Music Manager May Be A Workflow Designer The Old Music Business Loved A Gatekeeper For a long time, the dream was simple. Find a manager who knew the right people, could get the right meetings, and maybe knew which hotel lobby to haunt during a conference. The manager was the person with access. They had the phone numbers, the relationships, the mystery spreadsheet, and the ability to say, “Let me make a call,” which always sounded like wizardry even when it meant leaving a voicemail. That version of management is not dead. Relationships still matter. A good manager can still open doors, negotiate deals, protect an artist from bad contracts, and keep the wheels on the van when the business starts moving faster than the band can think. But for most independent artists, the first manager they need today is not a gatekeeper. It is a system. More specifically, it is the ability to design workflows that turn attention into relationships, relationships into income, and income into a career that does not collapse every time an algorithm sneezes. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Kaatwalk Kaatwalk is a Twin Cities-based singer-songwriter whose music is rooted in quiet honesty, emotional presence, and the kind of storytelling that turns everyday moments into something deeply human. Inspired by artists such as Brandi Carlile, Phoebe Bridgers, and Joni Mitchell, she writes with a reflective voice that values truth over polish and connection over perfection. Her sound moves easily across folk, Americana, indie, and singer-songwriter traditions without being boxed into one genre. At the center of it all is the song: intimate lyrics, stripped-down arrangements, and performances that feel personal, lived-in, and real. Kaatwalk draws from shared experiences, small details, emotional undercurrents, and the moments people often carry quietly. Her music gives those feelings room to breathe. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Trace Foster of Close Enemies Close Enemies is a rock band built on contrast: raw emotion and polished intensity, grit and melody, chaos and calm. Their sound blends hard-hitting guitar riffs, driving rhythms, atmospheric textures, and haunting vocals into music that feels both familiar and fresh. Rooted in the spirit of classic rock but shaped with a modern edge, Close Enemies creates songs that hit with power while still leaving room for mood, depth, and emotional weight. http://www.makingascene.org

Modern audio mastering has shifted from a focus on sheer volume to a nuanced understanding of loudness normalization across streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. The provided text explains that LUFS (Loudness Units Full Scale) serves as a vital measurement tool for human perception of sound rather than a strict creative limit. Musicians are encouraged to prioritize mix density and dynamic balance over hitting specific numerical targets, as over-processing can lead to distorted or lifeless tracks. Key technical safeguards, such as maintaining true peak headroom, ensure that audio remains clear during digital conversion and encoding processes. Ultimately, successful mastering requires volume-matched referencing and a focus on how a song translates across various listening environments. The source emphasizes that the goal of the contemporary engineer is to achieve a professional sound that feels impactful and alive regardless of platform adjustments. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents An Interview with Kyle LaLone Kyle LaLone is a roots-rock journeyman whose music lives at the crossroads of classic country, Americana, and heartland rock & roll. A guitarist, songwriter, and performer with deep roots in American music, LaLone writes songs built on grit, melody, and hard-earned truth. His sound nods to the guitar-playing storytellers who came before him, from Hank Williams to Tom Petty, while steadily carving out a road of his own. That road comes into sharper focus on Make My Own Way, an anthemic new record that finds LaLone stretching beyond the twang of his earlier releases and stepping into a tougher, more rock-driven sound. The album carries the honesty of country songwriting, the muscle of heartland rock, and the emotional weight of an artist who has lived through struggle and come out with something to say. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Indie Artist's AI Content Calendar That Actually Leads Somewhere Stop Feeding the Machine for Free Most indie artists do not need more content. That sounds wrong at first, because every platform tells artists the opposite. Instagram wants another reel. TikTok wants another clip. YouTube wants another short. Facebook wants another event post. Spotify wants another canvas, another artist pick, another profile update. The whole internet acts like your career will finally move if you can just post more, faster, louder, and with the right hook in the first three seconds. But that is not a business plan. That is treadmill work. The real problem is not that indie artists are lazy about content. Most working artists are already doing too much. They are writing songs, booking shows, loading gear, recording vocals, editing video, answering messages, chasing payments, shipping shirts, designing flyers, updating websites, pitching playlists, and trying to remember what city they are in next Friday. Then they are told they need to become full-time content creators on top of being full-time musicians. That is how the modern artist gets tricked. The platforms turn every artist into a free media worker, and then rent the attention back to them. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Artist Revenue Ladder: How Indie Artists Turn Free Fans Into Real Income Over Time There is a dangerous lie floating around the music business, and it has been sold to indie artists for years. The lie says that if enough people hear your music, the money will somehow show up later. Get more streams. Get more followers. Get more likes. Get more views. Feed the machine. Keep posting. Keep begging the algorithm to notice you. Keep hoping that one day a stranger in a boardroom or a playlist editor behind a locked digital curtain will point at your song and say, “This one.” That is not a business plan. That is a lottery ticket with a guitar strap. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Return Of The Regional Music Economy Why the Future of Independent Music May Be Closer to Home Than We Think There was a time when every serious artist was told the same story. Get out of town. Get in the van. Hit the road. Go national. Chase the playlist. Chase the press. Chase the algorithm. Chase the booking agent. Chase the big festival slot. Chase anything that looked bigger than the town you came from. The dream was always somewhere else. It was in another city. Another state. Another market. Another platform. Another gatekeeper's office. Another playlist editor's inbox. Another social media feed where the numbers looked big enough to feel like momentum. But the road has changed. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Maura Dunst Maura is a Minnesota-based multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and songwriter whose work moves with ease through bluegrass, Americana, roots, and folk. Known for her expressive fiddle and mandolin playing, strong harmony instincts, and sharp songwriting voice, she brings both fire and feel to every stage she steps onto. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Ghalia Volt No barriers. No boundaries. That has always been Ghalia Volt's approach to American roots music. Born in Belgium and now based in New Orleans, Ghalia Volt is a blues-rock singer, guitarist, drummer, and songwriter whose music refuses to stay in one lane. Her sound reaches across borders, pulling from the flamenco and traditional Spanish music she heard through her grandparents, the punk, garage rock, and psychobilly that shaped her early taste, and the deep blues traditions of artists like Skip James, J.B. Lenoir, and John Lee Hooker. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Kat Blue KAT Blue & The True Believers are a blues band built on fire, feel, and full-throttle conviction. Their new EP, Clock Strikes Blue, captures a group locked into what KAT calls an “all asides, all the time” spirit: no half-measures, no phoning it in, just hard-hitting blues played with purpose. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - Mixing Quietly: Why Lower Volume Makes Better Decisions There is one home studio habit that can improve almost every mix without costing a dime. It does not require a new interface, a new microphone, a new plug-in bundle, or some secret trick from a million-dollar control room. It is almost boring in how simple it is. Turn the monitors down. That's it. Not forever. Not so low that you can barely hear the song. Not as a punishment. Not because loud music is bad. Music is supposed to move air. Music is supposed to hit you in the chest when the moment calls for it. But when you are making mix decisions, especially in a home studio, loud volume can lie to you. Low volume tells the truth more often. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Artist Fan Passport OS: The Free Gateway To An Artist-Owned Music Economy The Music Business Needs A Middle Class Again The music business has never had a talent problem. It has had an ownership problem. Every town has artists who can move a room. Every scene has songwriters, bands, producers, players, DJs, engineers, promoters, and music lovers who are doing the work without the safety net. These are not hobbyists pretending to be artists. These are working creators trying to build something real in a business that keeps asking them to chase attention instead of own relationships. That is the problem the Making a Scene Artist Fan Passport OS was built to solve. http://www.makingascene.org