Making a Scene Presents

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Katy Vernon

Katy was born and raised in London, UK, but over the past dozen-plus years she’s become one of Minnesota’s busiest and most recognizable musicians. Blending melodic pop-folk songwriting with the twang and drive of an Americana band, Katy delivers songs that are hooky, heartfelt, and built to connect—whether she’s playing an intimate room or a big outdoor stage.

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Making a Scene Presents - Content That Adapts: Using AI to Personalize Posts for Different Types of Fans

There is a quiet little lie baked into modern music marketing, and most artists have been trained to accept it. The lie is this: one post is supposed to do everything.

It is supposed to hype the hardcore fans, introduce the new people, move tickets in one city, sell merch everywhere else, wake up dead email subscribers, impress the algorithm, and somehow still sound human. Then when it does not work, the artist gets blamed. Maybe the hook was weak. Maybe the image was wrong. Maybe the timing was bad. Maybe you just need to post more.

No. The real problem is simpler than that. You are trying to talk to different people as if they are the same person.

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Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Mike Guldin

Mike Guldin first picked up a guitar at age 15, and he’s spent the last 45+ years turning that spark into a road-tested blues career built in roadhouses, clubs, festivals, and theaters. A guitarist and vocalist with a deep respect for tradition and a serious love of groove, Guldin’s sound blends Chicago blues grit, Southern rock fire, and Memphis/Stax soul into a style his band proudly calls “Good Ole Butt-Shakin’ Music.”

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Sassparilla is a Portland, Oregon–based “punk-Americana” / roots-rock band that plays like a bar fight with a backbeat—in the best possible way. Led by singer-songwriter Kevin “Gus” Blackwell, the band blends the stomp of old American traditions with the bite and speed of punk, creating a sound that feels like hill country blues and old-time string-band music dragged into a loud, modern room and turned loose.

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Making a Scene Presents - The Suno-Warner Deal: When Big Music Stops Fighting AI and Starts Designing It

Something important just happened in the music business, and indie artists need to pay attention.

Warner Music Group and Suno announced a partnership built around licensed AI music. Under the deal, the companies will work on next-generation licensed models, Warner artists can opt in to AI experiences using their names, images, likenesses, voices, and compositions, and Suno will make major product changes in 2026, including phasing out its current models, requiring paid accounts for downloads, limiting downloads on paid tiers, and keeping unlimited downloads inside Suno Studio. As part of the same broader agreement, Suno also acquired Songkick from Warner.

That sounds like a product story. It sounds like a legal story. It sounds like one more AI headline in a year full of AI headlines. But for independent artists, it is really a power story. The Suno-Warner deal is one of the clearest signs yet that major music companies are moving from trying to fight generative AI from the outside to trying to shape it from the inside. Warner itself said the partnership is meant to forge a “blueprint for a next-generation licensed AI music platform.” Reuters also reported that Warner settled its infringement case with Suno so the company could move toward licensed models.

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Making a Scene Presents - The Artist-Owned Ecosystem: Replacing the Label, Distributor, and Platform

It usually happens after the show.

Not onstage. Not in the comments. Not when the playlist adds hit. It happens when the room is half empty, the drummer is packing hardware, somebody is folding shirts at the merch table, and the artist is looking at a phone full of “engagement” that does not pay tomorrow’s hotel bill. That is the moment the old music business starts to look less like a dream and more like a machine built to turn artist momentum into platform traffic, label leverage, and somebody else’s data.

For years, the industry sold one big fantasy. Get signed. Get distributed. Get promoted. Get placed in front of the audience. Then the money will come. But the modern version of that deal has a nasty twist. Even when artists do get attention, they often do not get ownership. The fan relationship lives on someone else’s platform. The audience data sits in someone else’s dashboard. The checkout happens inside someone else’s system. The artist becomes the fuel, while the infrastructure belongs to everybody else. That is not a career. That is a dependency. And dependency is not the same thing as growth.

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Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Alexis P Suter

Alexis P. Suter is a three-time Blues Music Award nominee—recognized in major categories including the Koko Taylor Award and Best Soul Blues Female Artist—and one of the most commanding voices in modern blues and soul. Raised in Brooklyn in a musically gifted family, Alexis grew up with the belief that music is not just entertainment—it’s an emotional and spiritual experience. That idea still sits at the center of everything she does on stage.

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Making a Scene Presents - AI-Driven Fan Journeys: Mapping Every Step From First Listen to Lifetime Fan

There is a quiet tragedy happening in the modern music business, and most independent artists have been taught to call it normal.

A stranger hears a song in a playlist. They like it. They tap through to a profile. Maybe they watch a clip. Maybe they save the track. Maybe they even tell a friend. Then the trail goes cold. The artist never learns who that person was, never learns what caught their ear, never learns what city they live in, never learns whether they wanted a vinyl copy, a ticket, a livestream pass, a membership, a behind-the-scenes demo, or just a reason to come back tomorrow. The fan showed up. The system shrugged. The moment passed.

That is the real leak in the independent music economy. It is not just low streaming payouts, though those are part of the problem. It is not just social media reach, though that is rented land and always has been. The bigger problem is that most artists still do not control the road between attention and income. They get discovery, but they do not own the journey. They get a listen, but they do not build a relationship. They get noise, but they do not get memory.

AI changes that if you use it the right way.

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Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Aleksandra Josic of Here and Everywhere

Fronted by Aleksandra Josic, a vocalist audiences regularly describe as “one of the most powerful and emotional live voices in the world today,” the band has earned a reputation for performances that feel raw, immersive, and unforgettable. There’s a rare kind of honesty in what they do—no posturing, no manufactured drama—just a fearless voice, a band that knows how to build tension and release, and songs that hit like they were written to be felt in a room full of people.

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Compression in Context: Why Soloing Tracks Is Killing Your Mix

There is a little button in every DAW that has wrecked more home studio mixes than bad microphones, cheap headphones, and internet “preset culture” combined. It is the Solo button.

That sounds dramatic, but not by much. Every indie artist knows the move. You are deep in a mix. The vocal feels uneven. The bass feels wild. The snare is jumping out in ugly ways. So you solo the track, pull up a compressor, and start shaping. Suddenly the part sounds bigger, tighter, smoother, richer, louder, more “professional.” You un-solo it, hit play on the full mix, and somehow the whole song feels smaller. The vocal no longer connects. The bass lost its groove. The drums feel choked. The track you “fixed” in solo is now fighting the record instead of serving it.

That is the trap.

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