Making a Scene Presents

Making a Scene Presents - Stop Selling Things to Your Fans. Start Building Things With Them.

How fan-created merchandise, shared ownership, AI-powered creativity, and a new approach to artist-approved businesses could turn an independent musician's audience into a community of entrepreneurs.

What If Your Next Great Merchandise Idea Comes From Your Audience?

Somewhere in America, an independent musician is sitting in a room filled with cardboard boxes containing 200 T-shirts that seemed like a brilliant idea six months ago. The artwork looked terrific on the computer screen, the printing company offered a discount for ordering in bulk, and everybody in the band agreed the shirts would sell like crazy. Unfortunately, the audience appears to have missed that particular meeting. Now the shirts are taking up space next to the spare microphone stands, the band still owes money on the printing bill, and the drummer has suggested giving them away at Christmas.

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Making a Scene Presents - You Own Your Masters. So Why Can Someone Else Make Your Music Disappear?

The DistroKid and Universal Music Group dispute exposes a dangerous weakness in the independent music business. Artists fought for the right to own their recordings, but owning the music means surprisingly little when someone else controls access to the audience. It's time to rethink what artist independence really means.

The Day Your Music Disappears

Imagine waking up on a Tuesday morning, pouring yourself a cup of coffee, and checking your streaming numbers. You have spent the last six months promoting your latest record, playing shows, sending emails, talking to radio stations, and convincing every friend and relative who still answers your calls to give the music a listen. Your songs are finally starting to find an audience. Maybe one has landed on a popular playlist, or perhaps a music blogger has discovered your work and started sending listeners your way. Things are moving in the right direction, which is about as close to a miracle as most independent musicians experience in today's music business.

Then you discover that your music is gone.

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Making a Scene Brings You Gerry Casey's Interview with Chris Vincent

Chris Vincent is an award-winning singer-songwriter and slide guitarist based in New Orleans, Louisiana, a city he often describes as both home and muse. Its rhythms, history, contradictions, and restless creative energy run through his music, giving his songs a sense of place without ever confining them to one tradition.

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Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Sunjay

Sunjay’s tenth studio album, Split The Sheets, brings a long creative journey full circle. It follows Black & Blues Revisited (2022) and the critically acclaimed Chris Smither tribute I’m Just Like You (2024), two records that looked closely at the music, writers, and traditions that helped shape him as an artist. Split The Sheets completes that arc while also opening the door to something broader, bolder, and more personal.

Fresh from a successful UK tour, international appearances in the Czech Republic and Germany, and support from BBC Radio 2, Sunjay returns with what may be his most ambitious and sonically adventurous album to date.

At its heart, Split The Sheets is an album about love in all its contradictions. Across fourteen songs, Sunjay explores attraction, commitment, devotion, jealousy, humor, lust, heartbreak, regret, longing, and loss. It is a record about the light and shade of relationships, and about the many ways love can comfort, complicate, inspire, and undo us.

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Making a Scene Presents - Your Music Catalog Is Becoming a Financial Asset. Here's How to Use It Without Selling Your Masters.

The music business is discovering that a catalog can be more than a collection of recordings. It can become a source of funding, financial independence, and long-term opportunity. But as companies like Pipeline build a new market around music royalties, the question is whether working independent musicians will finally get access to the same financial tools available to larger music companies.

The independent music business has spent decades telling artists that their music has value, usually right before somebody else explains why they should own it. Record labels have offered recording budgets in exchange for master rights. Publishers have offered advances against songs. Investment companies have purchased catalogs from musicians who needed money today more than they needed royalty checks tomorrow. The deals have changed over the years, but the basic idea has remained stubbornly familiar. The people who control the money tend to end up controlling the music.

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Making a Scene Presents - The Music Industry Has Been Collecting Royalties. But Does It Know What Songs Are Actually Being Played?

New research from Britain's grassroots music venues raises troubling questions about how live-performance royalties are measured, who gets paid, and whether the next generation of music technology could finally give independent songwriters a more accurate accounting.

There's Music Coming From the Stage. Is There Money Finding Its Way Back?

Imagine you're sitting in a little music club on a Friday night. The place holds maybe a hundred people, the bartender is having trouble keeping up, and a three-piece blues band is absolutely tearing the roof off. The guitarist has been playing professionally for twenty years, the bass player has a day job because apparently being able to play bass doesn't impress the electric company, and the drummer is holding everything together with the sort of musical magic that deserves considerably more money than the contents of the tip jar.

The band plays fourteen songs. Ten are originals written by the musicians onstage, three are obscure blues covers, and one is a rearranged version of an old soul classic that sounds almost nothing like the recording that made it famous. The audience loves it, the venue sells drinks, and the musicians walk away with their agreed payment and perhaps a few merchandise sales.

Somewhere in the background, however, another financial transaction is supposed to be taking place. The venue's music licensing arrangements help support a system intended to compensate the people who wrote the compositions being performed. That money moves through performance-rights organizations, which attempt to determine which songwriters and publishers are entitled to payment.

But there's a rather important question buried in that process. How does the organization distributing the money actually know what the band played?

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Making a Scene Presents - When the Streams Lie: Washington Is Finally Looking at the Real Cost of Music Streaming Fraud
The Federal Government Is Asking a Question Independent Artists Should Help Answer

For years, streaming fraud has been discussed as though it were mostly an accounting problem involving robots, suspicious playlists and fractions of pennies that somehow escaped from a giant royalty bucket. That description has never really captured the damage. An independent artist does not build a career inside a royalty spreadsheet. They decide where to tour, where to buy advertising, which songs deserve another marketing push, which cities seem to be growing, what merchandise to manufacture and where their next precious few hundred dollars should go. When the numbers feeding those decisions are fake, the artist can lose far more money outside the streaming platform than they ever expected to earn from the streams themselves.

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Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Heather Ann Lomax

Heather Anne Lomax is an Americana, rock, country-rock, blues, and soul artist whose music is built on emotional honesty, lived experience, and a deep connection to the traditions that shaped American roots music. Originally from Kansas City, she has spent the past decade carving out a sound that feels both timeless and unmistakably personal, earning critical acclaim, international radio play, and opportunities to share stages with artists including Wynonna and The Big Noise, Lee Ann Womack, Blake Shelton, Blood, Sweat & Tears, the late Kenny Rogers, and The Marshall Tucker Band.

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Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's interview with Dustin Arbuckle

Dustin Arbuckle and The Damnations are not a band you can easily associate with one specific genre, and that's how they planned it. Arbuckle, a veteran of the progressive roots music scene whose singing and harmonica playing first came into prominence in Moreland & Arbuckle, has been kicking up fresh dust with The Damnations since 2017. A musician of vast appetites, he’s long held an appreciation for traditional American music in the vein of Charley Patton as well as the cross-pollinated sounds of The Band or Stax-style soul. The diverse musical sensibilities of The Damnations (Brandon Hudspeth on guitar, Caleb Drummond or Mark Foley on bass, and Kendall Newby on Drums) allow for all of that along with occasional forays into deep country and even jazz. “When we started playing together we all wanted the band to be a space where we could play anything we wanted to," Arbuckle notes, "and that's created this cross-genre electric Americana vibe."

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Making a Scene Presents - Proximity Effect and Vocal Tone: How a Few Inches Can Change Everything About Your Voice

Understanding the relationship between microphone distance, bass response, vocal intimacy, and recording quality can help independent musicians make better recordings without spending another dime on equipment.

The Most Overlooked Tone Control in Your Home Studio

There is a particular kind of frustration that nearly every independent musician experiences sooner or later. You spend weeks choosing the right microphone, watching reviews, comparing specifications, and convincing yourself that one particular piece of equipment will finally deliver the professional vocal sound you have been chasing. You connect your new microphone, put on your headphones, sing a few lines, and discover that your voice sounds remarkably similar to the way it sounded through your old microphone. Naturally, you begin investigating expensive preamps, vintage compressors, and mysterious plugins that promise to add warmth, depth, and something called analog magic. Meanwhile, one of the most powerful tone controls in your entire recording studio is sitting right in front of your face, and it doesn't even have a knob.

That control is the distance between your mouth and your microphone.

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