Bobby Owsinski's Inner Circle Podcast

Audio plugin developers who assume machine learning is the right tool will find the process used by Hannes Andersson and the team at Oeksound genuinely surprising.

Andersson is CEO of Oeksound, the creator of Soothe, the dynamic resonance suppressor that became so dominant on Spotify's Top 50, yet it's team rebuilt the algorithm from scratch. 

Oeksound's secret is two people in a room listening for hours until the math feels right, a standard that quietly shaped the sound of a lot of recorded music without anyone outside the company knowing it.

When Soothe 2 went viral during COVID and overuse artifacts began appearing on Spotify and Apple Music top tracks, the team rebuilt the core. 

Knowing what a plugin is actually taking away matters as much as knowing how to use it, and Oeksound's other tools reflect that same standard. 

Bloom, the adaptive tone shaper, reads the entire incoming signal before processing, so a high-shelf boost for warmth automatically pulls back when sibilance arrives rather than amplifying it. 

Spiff began as a mouth-click suppressor for close-mic'd vocals and evolved into an adaptive transient shaper that Andersson also uses for frequency-specific stereo placement, boosting attack on one channel while keeping overall levels balanced. 

Every product is tuned through hours of listening sessions by engineers who also write, produce, and mix, because emotion is the only benchmark Oeksound trusts.

Connect with Hannes:
LinkedIn
Oeksound

Ad link: Explore The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook (6th Edition), the go-to guide for modern mixing.

Thank you for tuning in to Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle, the podcast that takes you deep inside the music industry. Each week, Bobby shares insights, news, analysis, and conversations with the movers and shakers shaping today’s music world.

📌 Explore Bobby’s best-selling books

🎙️ Nail that pro vocal sound: clear, upfront, and mix-ready. Learn how in Bobby’s Vocal Mixing Mini-Course

🎧 Discover more mixing and production courses

📲 Follow Bobby for more tips, insights, and updates:

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Bluesky

🎙️ New episodes release every Tuesday at 9AM Pacific on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

Music. Business. Creativity. Straight from the Inner Circle.

Produced by APodcastGeek: https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek

Song copyright protection for musicians who record ideas with a voice memo at 3am proves nothing in a dispute. That original moment completely unverifiable.  

Nadim Rahman built Songproof, a dual-blockchain platform, after recognising that musicians needed an irrefutable timestamp at the exact moment inspiration strikes, not after the fact. 

For 99 cents per song, Songproof issues what Rahman calls a birth certificate for your music, anchored to the blockchain, so that if a collaborator or label ever questions who wrote what first, the proof already exists and cannot be altered.

Songproof actually uses two separate blockchains for distinct purposes: Bitcoin handles the timestamp, creating irrefutable proof of when a song was created, while Polygon handles split sheets through smart contracts. 

Hear more about Songproof on this week's episode.

Ad link: Explore The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook (6th Edition), the go-to guide for modern mixing.

Thank you for tuning in to Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle, the podcast that takes you deep inside the music industry. Each week, Bobby shares insights, news, analysis, and conversations with the movers and shakers shaping today’s music world.

📌 Explore Bobby’s best-selling books

🎙️ Nail that pro vocal sound: clear, upfront, and mix-ready. Learn how in Bobby’s Vocal Mixing Mini-Course

🎧 Discover more mixing and production courses

📲 Follow Bobby for more tips, insights, and updates:

Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
Bluesky

🎙️ New episodes release every Tuesday at 9AM Pacific on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

Music. Business. Creativity. Straight from the Inner Circle.

Produced by APodcastGeek: https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek

Music industry professionals still betting on major labels to develop artists should know the system has structurally exited that business. 

On this week's episode I break down the data showing how UMG and WMG now redirect spending toward catalog acquisitions rather than new careers. . . 

. . . have made AI licensing deals explicitly designed to reduce artist relationships. . .

. . . and then kept the copyright settlement money those deals generated without passing any of it on to the artists whose music was used for training. 

I also looked at:

• TikTok trying to fill this development vacuum, but 59% of its new-user feeds are already AI-generated content, so even that alternative is narrowing fast. 
• Spotify's global top 50 fell from over 90% new releases in 2019-2020 to roughly 70% by early 2026, and by May seven of the top ten songs were more than two years old. 
• Luminate found that 56% of 13-to-24-year-olds regularly listen to music made before 2000, with 25% of that group favoring tracks from the 1990s or earlier. 
• Hip hop, which held roughly 30% market share at its late-2000s-to-2020 peak, has gone entire months without a single Billboard top 10 placement. 
• Suno raised $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation while battling UMG and Sony in federal court over training data. 
• Tidal announced it will pay zero royalties on fully AI-generated tracks and badge them for listeners. 
• The AFM's lawsuit against Warner and Universal over withheld AI settlement money gives artists a concrete legal precedent to cite when evaluating any publisher or label deal where royalty flow-through terms are left unstated. 
• YouTube's argument that uploading a video constitutes blanket consent to train Google's Lyria 3 model shows why reading platform terms of service before posting has become a practical rights-management step, not a formality. 

On the gear side:

• Dean Guitar's parent Armadillo Enterprises filing for Chapter 11 after a Gibson trademark loss illustrates how intellectual property exposure can collapse a company faster than market conditions, 
• while Höfner's acquisition by GEWA Music suggests bankruptcy does not always end a legacy instrument brand
• Royer Labs has a new home
• and a new honor for Jimi Hendrix in New York City

Ad link: Explore The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook (6th Edition), the go-to guide for modern mixing.

Thank you for tuning in to Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle, the podcast that takes you deep inside the music industry. Each week, Bobby shares insights, news, analysis, and conversations with the movers and shakers shaping today’s music world.

📌 Explore Bobby’s best-selling books

🎙️ Nail that pro vocal sound: clear, upfront, and mix-ready. Learn how in Bobby’s Vocal Mixing Mini-Course

🎧 Discover more mixing and production courses

📲 Follow Bobby for more tips, insights, and updates:

Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
Bluesky

🎙️ New episodes release every Tuesday at 9AM Pacific on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

Music. Business. Creativity. Straight from the Inner Circle.

Produced by APodcastGeek: https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek

Independent musicians sometimes upload masters that are too hot, so they lose transient detail the moment streaming platforms apply loudness normalization.

Mastering engineer Jeff Graves spent two and a half years measuring 214 audio fingerprints across 15 samples per genre to build a 24-stage AI mastering platform, and in this conversation he explains exactly why delivering at the target LUFS level protects the dynamics and clarity that make a song translate from earbuds to car speakers. 

His platform flags any process that compresses the loudness range by more than 1.5 LU, giving independent artists the transparency that black-box services have always withheld.

Jeff built LuvLang Studio after years of frustration with opaque online mastering services like Landr and eMaster, which he says run tracks through only seven or eight processes without explaining what they do. 

His platform applies 24 named stages, measures LRA pre and post chain, and rejects uploads where headroom is insufficient rather than attempting to salvage a bad recording. 

Users can choose single or album mode, blend a reference track via a percentage slider, and adjust a 7-band EQ. Three output tiers cover MP3, 24-bit, and 24-bit with full options, with bundle pricing for multi-song projects. 

The platform also embeds metadata with track titles formatted exactly as the artist specifies and links directly to distributors such as CD Baby.

For bedroom producers who have never had a mastering budget, the educational layer built into this workflow may matter as much as the output file. 

Every stage is named and visible, so each session teaches the vocabulary behind the decisions, things like why true peak spikes hiding between samples cause distortion only after a platform compresses the file, or why classical dynamic LRA typically falls between 10 and 20 LU while a heavily compressed master lands between 3 and 7. 

Understanding those numbers gives an independent artist enough grounding to judge when a result is trustworthy and when it signals a problem upstream in the mix.

Connect with Jeff:
LinkedIn
LuvLang Studio

Ad link: Explore The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook (6th Edition), the go-to guide for modern mixing.

Thank you for tuning in to Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle, the podcast that takes you deep inside the music industry. Each week, Bobby shares insights, news, analysis, and conversations with the movers and shakers shaping today’s music world.

📌 Explore Bobby’s best-selling books

🎙️ Nail that pro vocal sound: clear, upfront, and mix-ready. Learn how in Bobby’s Vocal Mixing Mini-Course

🎧 Discover more mixing and production courses

📲 Follow Bobby for more tips, insights, and updates:

Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
Bluesky

🎙️ New episodes release every Tuesday at 9AM Pacific on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

Music. Business. Creativity. Straight from the Inner Circle.

Produced by APodcastGeek: https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek

On this week's episode, session vocalist Darlene Koldenhoven tells us how her music hit #4 on the Billboard classical crossover chart with no manager or label.

The common assumption that a major-label infrastructure is required to chart is exactly what her story dismantles, and she walks through the specific decisions that produced number-one worldwide radio chart results as an independent artist.

Darlene, a veteran of over 1,000 studio sessions and 14 self-produced solo albums, separates creative and business calendar periods rather than blending them, because the mental demands of each pull in different directions.

On the chart side, she treats Billboard eligibility as a research problem: the weekly sales threshold shifts based on competing releases, so she tracks rule changes instead of targeting a fixed number.

Her vocal coaching draws on audio psychophonology, a listening-rehabilitation method developed by Dr. Alfred Tomatis, which she uses to address frequency deficiencies standard technique cannot reach.

These same principles of persistence, research, and structured execution are what allowed Darlene to chart and build a career without a manager or agent.

Of special note is the story where she served as the session contractor who hired the vocal trio for Pink Floyd's sessions with producer Bob Ezrin, and Ezrin asked her personally to coax David Gilmour out of the tracking room when the blend wasn't working.

Connect with Darlene:
Website
Facebook
Instagram
YouTube

Ad link: Explore The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook (6th Edition), the go-to guide for modern mixing.

Thank you for tuning in to Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle, the podcast that takes you deep inside the music industry. Each week, Bobby shares insights, news, analysis, and conversations with the movers and shakers shaping today’s music world.

📌 Explore Bobby’s best-selling books

🎙️ Nail that pro vocal sound: clear, upfront, and mix-ready. Learn how in Bobby’s Vocal Mixing Mini-Course

🎧 Discover more mixing and production courses

📲 Follow Bobby for more tips, insights, and updates:

Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
Bluesky

🎙️ New episodes release every Tuesday at 9AM Pacific on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

Music. Business. Creativity. Straight from the Inner Circle.

Produced by APodcastGeek: https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek

Music career longevity is what separates artists who last from those who burn out chasing the wrong metrics.

Too many aspiring musicians hand control to social platforms, grinding out content as servants to algorithms while the industry gaslights them with success measures that have nothing to do with real longevity. Keith Jopling spent 25 years inside the business, including time at Spotify, then interviewed 80 artists and bands to write Riding the Rollercoaster, and the creative director model he extracted from that research shows musicians how to flip the equation: command the platforms, define your own hit, and build a career on your terms before the rollercoaster throws you off.

Jopling maps five routes to longevity: a hit song, a classic album, being dropped by your label, becoming a cult artist, and building your brand. The dropped-by-your-label route surprises people, but his case studies show artists consistently respond by making their strongest record since their debut, independently or on a new label. On the album question, he credits Taylor Swift's pandemic releases Folklore and Evermore with pulling fans back to long-form listening, and points to Charli XCX's Brat as proof an album can still become a genuine cultural phenomenon. Harry Styles launched a new album with listening parties in 40 cities, a Netflix special filmed at the Co-op in Manchester, reinforcing that the release cycle still drives touring and commercial momentum.

Jopling's most actionable insight is the creative director model: appoint someone inside the band, or bring in a trusted collaborator, to own the visual and commercial identity of your project from day one. Your manager handles the weekly hustle; this role thinks longer term, ensuring your photography and platform presence tell one coherent story. He also reframes the hit song entirely: forget chart position and focus on the song your crowd sings back loudest at every show. That is your hit, and that is what you build forward from. Both moves return control to the artist and away from the platforms and gatekeepers that longevity research consistently shows will not build a career for you.

Connect with Keith:
LinkedIn
Riding the Rollercoaster (Book)
Website

Ad link: Explore The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook (6th Edition), the go-to guide for modern mixing.

Thank you for tuning in to Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle, the podcast that takes you deep inside the music industry. Each week, Bobby shares insights, news, analysis, and conversations with the movers and shakers shaping today’s music world.

📌 Explore Bobby’s best-selling books

🎙️ Nail that pro vocal sound: clear, upfront, and mix-ready. Learn how in Bobby’s Vocal Mixing Mini-Course

🎧 Discover more mixing and production courses

📲 Follow Bobby for more tips, insights, and updates:

Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
Bluesky

🎙️ New episodes release every Tuesday at 9AM Pacific on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

Music. Business. Creativity. Straight from the Inner Circle.

Produced by APodcastGeek: https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek

On this week's episode, Bobby speaks with Dr. Bill Evans, audio scientist, producer, educator, and inventor of the Performance Restoration methodology.

Bill believes that drum recording has always involved a painful tradeoff, but it doesn't have to.

Most engineers accept mic bleed as an unavoidable character of a drum sound, questioning whether removing it could actually alter the drummer's true performance DNA.

Bill spent seven years answering exactly that question. His concept of the Virtual Audio Workstation, involves a new audio file format that remains compatible with WAV files while carrying additional performance metadata.

The format separates articulations, preserves room information as an independent element, and provides what Bill describes as functionally infinite dynamic range, allowing details like hi-hat foot checks to be raised dramatically without introducing grain or artifact.

At the center of that work is PRISM, Bill's AI framework that converts audio to MIDI, edits it, and converts it back again, using the artist's own recordings as the sole training data rather than a generative pool.

The distinction is important. Generative AI aims for plausible. PRISM aims for what a specific musician would actually play.

One of the earliest demonstrations came during a Flying Colors session when seven seconds of guitarist Steve Morse's solo disappeared. Evans reconstructed the missing passage through PRISM, and Morse, known for being exacting about his performances, could not identify the recreated section.

The larger takeaway is a fundamental rethinking of how engineers approach drum recording.

By separating articulations and ambience into controllable elements, PRISM preserves ghost notes, cymbal strike positions, and subtle performance details that are typically lost in the production process, allowing the final recording to reflect the musician's actual performance rather than a substitute version of it.

Ad link: Explore The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook (6th Edition), the go-to guide for modern mixing.

Thank you for tuning in to Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle, the podcast that takes you deep inside the music industry. Each week, Bobby shares insights, news, analysis, and conversations with the movers and shakers shaping today’s music world.

📌 Explore Bobby’s best-selling books

🎙️ Nail that pro vocal sound: clear, upfront, and mix-ready. Learn how in Bobby’s Vocal Mixing Mini-Course

🎧 Discover more mixing and production courses

📲 Follow Bobby for more tips, insights, and updates:

Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
Bluesky

🎙️ New episodes release every Tuesday at 9AM Pacific on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

Music. Business. Creativity. Straight from the Inner Circle.

Produced by APodcastGeek: https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek

Female artists who hire producers risk losing creative control before a single song is released.

On this week's podcast episode, Xylo Aria, founder of Music Production for Women(MPW), tells us how she learned this the hard way, by paying for sessions where male producers overrode her vision, leaving her with music she never put out and studios where personal safety competed with creative freedom.

Seven years building MPW taught her that the real barrier isn't technical knowledge, but confidence and the self-imposed belief that production simply isn't for women.

She shares how she dismantled those barriers and why owning your production is the only way to fully own your art.

Xylo started writing songs at 12, spent four years as a corporate accountant, then quit after a close friend died suddenly, moved to the UK, and launched MPW about two weeks after leaving a contract role.

The platform runs a year-long Master Your Music program, alongside free online and in-person events throughout the year.

Students range from complete DAW beginners to demo-makers with knowledge gaps, spanning electronic, folk, singer-songwriter, and sound-healing genres.

Xylo's sharpest takeaway from her years of teaching is that 70 percent finished is great. Stop tweaking, release, and move on because productivity compounds when you let go.

For women who have paid for sessions and walked away with music they never released, she advises to open the DAW now, build muscle memory across your own genre, and take the first step before you feel ready.

Waiting until you're further along is the trap, because every finished project you own outright is one where no one else controlled the outcome or the room.

Connect with Xylo:
LinkedIn
Website
MPW
Instagram
TikTok (MPW)

Ad link: Explore The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook (6th Edition), the go-to guide for modern mixing.

Thank you for tuning in to Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle, the podcast that takes you deep inside the music industry. Each week, Bobby shares insights, news, analysis, and conversations with the movers and shakers shaping today’s music world.

📌 Explore Bobby’s best-selling books

🎙️ Nail that pro vocal sound: clear, upfront, and mix-ready. Learn how in Bobby’s Vocal Mixing Mini-Course

🎧 Discover more mixing and production courses

📲 Follow Bobby for more tips, insights, and updates:

Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
Bluesky

🎙️ New episodes release every Tuesday at 9AM Pacific on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

Music. Business. Creativity. Straight from the Inner Circle.

Produced by APodcastGeek: https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek

On this week's episode, Elliot Easton, guitarist for The Cars and Creedence Clearwater Revisited, takes us through his journey with the band and beyond.

Easton looks back at The Cars' origins, from getting a label deal the old fashioned way, to connecting with famed producer Roy Thomas Baker, to recording the band's initial albums, to how his many influences shaped his solos in the studio.

He then tells us about his time with Creedence Clearwater Revisited, and the broken tour with The New Cars where bad management sunk a potentially good thing.

Finally we talk about Elliot's Rickenbacker 12 string and his signature Gibson Tikibird Firebird, which has become somewhat of a collectors item.

If you've ever enjoyed The Cars music and Elliot's playing, you'll love the ground that we cover in this episode.

Connect with Elliot:
Instagram
Facebook
X

Ad link: Explore The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook (6th Edition), the go-to guide for modern mixing.

Thank you for tuning in to Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle, the podcast that takes you deep inside the music industry. Each week, Bobby shares insights, news, analysis, and conversations with the movers and shakers shaping today’s music world.

📌 Explore Bobby’s best-selling books

🎙️ Nail that pro vocal sound: clear, upfront, and mix-ready. Learn how in Bobby’s Vocal Mixing Mini-Course

🎧 Discover more mixing and production courses

📲 Follow Bobby for more tips, insights, and updates:

Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
Bluesky

🎙️ New episodes release every Tuesday at 9AM Pacific on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

Music. Business. Creativity. Straight from the Inner Circle.

Produced by APodcastGeek: https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek

Music business professionals who still see major labels as career partners need to hear what Bobby Owsinski lays out plainly: Universal Music Group's pursuit of a $3 billion Spotify stock sell-off signals that labels have shifted from artist development engines into financial instruments that happen to license music. 

The failure mode is assuming the label is on your side when, as Bobby explains, artists are a line item on a balance sheet. 

His counterintuitive fix is to stop waiting for label validation and recognize that AI flooding submissions without capturing listeners, and stagnating streaming growth, are signals that independent builders have more leverage now than at any point in the modern music business.

Bobby walks through specific pressure points across the business. 

YouTube raised individual plans from $10.99 to $11.99 and family plans from $16.99 to $18.99, compounding recent hikes from Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon that together push subscribers toward cancellation. 

Universal Music Group's proposed $3 billion Spotify stock sell-off earmarks roughly $850 million for artists, but under an artist-centric model that concentrates payouts on Taylor Swift and Drake rather than developing acts. T

he BMG-Concord merger introduces private equity firm Great Mountain Partners at 33% ownership. IFPI data shows 837 million global streaming subscribers, doubled since 2020, yet growth in high-revenue Western markets is stalling.

Listeners leave with a clear-eyed framework for evaluating every major-label conversation. 

Bobby's evidence shows labels are optimizing for catalog margins and investor returns, not artist development, so traction you build independently is no longer a stepping stone to a deal but leverage you already own. 

Private equity now shapes both BMG and the UMG acquisition bid, compressing the window where a label adds more than it extracts. The practical move is to treat label infrastructure as a specific tool for scaling from star to superstar, and only if you are already there. Otherwise, the balance sheet math works against you before the contract is signed.

Ad link: Explore The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook (6th Edition), the go-to guide for modern mixing.

Thank you for tuning in to Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle, the podcast that takes you deep inside the music industry. Each week, Bobby shares insights, news, analysis, and conversations with the movers and shakers shaping today’s music world.

📌 Explore Bobby’s best-selling books

🎙️ Nail that pro vocal sound: clear, upfront, and mix-ready. Learn how in Bobby’s Vocal Mixing Mini-Course

🎧 Discover more mixing and production courses

📲 Follow Bobby for more tips, insights, and updates:

Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
Bluesky

🎙️ New episodes release every Tuesday at 9AM Pacific on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

Music. Business. Creativity. Straight from the Inner Circle.

Produced by APodcastGeek: https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek