Making a Scene Presents

Making a Scene Presents - Washington Just Changed the AI Music Fight
If AI Training Becomes Fair Use, Independent Artists Need a Bigger Rights Strategy

For the last several years, the music business has been circling one giant question about artificial intelligence: whether AI companies should have to pay for the copyrighted music they use to train their models. That debate has attracted artists, record labels, publishers, technology companies, lawyers, lobbyists and enough venture capital to make almost any musician suspicious. The basic argument has always sounded simple. Creators say their work has value and should not be fed into commercial systems without permission or compensation, while AI companies argue that models learn from existing material in ways that can qualify as fair use. What changed this week is that the U.S. government stepped much more clearly into that argument, and Washington is leaning toward giving AI developers considerable freedom to train on copyrighted material.

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Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Donna Herula

Donna Herula is an award-winning blues singer, songwriter, resonator slide guitarist, bandleader, educator, and Chicago Blues Hall of Fame inductee whose music bridges Delta blues, early Chicago blues, folk, soul, gospel, Americana, and New Orleans rhythm. Hailed by Living Blues Magazine for her “superlative guitar prowess,” Herula has built a reputation as a powerful acoustic and electric blues artist with a gift for emotional honesty, intricate guitar work, and songs that carry both strength and vulnerability.

Based in the Chicago area, Herula leads both the Donna Herula Trio, an acoustic folk-blues group, and the Donna Herula Band, a full electric blues ensemble. Across those settings, she moves with ease between intimate acoustic storytelling and high-energy band performances, keeping the blues tradition alive while writing from a distinctly modern and personal point of view.

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Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Michael Christie of The Kings of Cool

The Kings of Cool are a Ballyshannon, County Donegal band whose music blends classic guitar pop, soft rock, country, jazz, and the melodic craft of timeless songwriting. Built around Michael Christie, Jason Kelly, and Stephen Gallagher, the band carries the easy chemistry of musicians who have known each other for years, played together in different settings, and found a new creative spark at exactly the moment the world seemed to stop.

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Making a Scene Presents - The Fan, the Brand and the Music
Why the Future of an Independent Music Career May Depend Less on Finding More Listeners and More on Building Better Relationships

There is something wonderfully strange about the modern music business. An independent artist can sit in a bedroom in Georgia, make a record, distribute it around the world, reach listeners in countries they have never visited, sell a ticket directly to someone three states away and talk to a fan on the other side of the planet before breakfast. The machinery that once required record companies, distributors, radio promotion departments, warehouses, retail stores and a fair amount of begging is now available to almost anyone with a laptop and enough patience to remember seventeen passwords.

Yet somehow, after all this technological progress, many artists know less about their actual fans than the local bar band knew thirty years ago.

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Making a Scene Presents - SoundCloud Put the Sale Next to Discovery. That Could Change the Indie Music Business

There is something almost delightfully old-fashioned about one of the more interesting music-business announcements of 2026. A fan hears a song, likes the song, decides it is worth a few dollars, gives the artist some money, and receives a copy of the music. After more than two decades of streaming pools, recommendation engines, royalty calculations, subscription tiers, content IDs, creator dashboards, discovery algorithms, and enough acronyms to make a federal agency jealous, SoundCloud has stumbled back onto a business model people understood perfectly well when record stores still had listening stations and somebody behind the counter knew which local band was worth hearing.

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Making a Scene Presents - The Labels Aren’t Fighting AI. They’re Buying Into It. So Where Is the Indie Artist’s Equity?

For the last few years, independent musicians have been handed a very simple story about artificial intelligence. AI was the thing coming for your songs, your voice, your recording career, your session work and, if the more dramatic headlines were to be believed, possibly the last decent cup of coffee in the control room. Artists were warned about scraped catalogs, cloned voices, machine-generated recordings and giant technology companies building enormous businesses from human creative work without asking permission first. A lot of those warnings were legitimate, because the questions around copyright, consent, attribution, training data and compensation are real, unresolved and currently being fought over in courtrooms, licensing offices and corporate boardrooms.

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Making a Scene Presents - There Are Humans Inside the WAV File: The AFM AI Lawsuit and the Rights Revolution Independent Artists Should Start Building Now

There is a wonderful moment at the end of making a record when all the complicated things that went into it suddenly appear to become simple. The drummer has gone home, the guitar amps are quiet, the background vocals have finally stopped multiplying, the producer has approved the mix, and somebody has decided that the mastering revision really is the last revision this time. Sitting on the hard drive is one beautiful WAV file, although years of recording-studio experience suggest there is at least a fighting chance it has been given a name like SONG_MASTER_FINAL_V8_REALLY_USE_THIS_ONE.wav while several neighboring files make equally persuasive claims to the throne.

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Jovin Webb did not find the blues. He was born into them.

Raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Webb grew up surrounded by gospel music, Southern church culture, Gulf Coast grit, and the kind of real-life struggle that has always fed the deepest blues. He built his voice the old-fashioned way: singing from lived experience, playing night after night, and learning how to turn pain, faith, temptation, survival, and hope into music that sounds both ancient and urgently alive.

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Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Leslie Waugh

Leslie Waugh is a Texas-based Americana singer-songwriter whose music tells the kind of stories that country music was built to carry: not the glossy kind about beer, trucks, and easy slogans, but the deeper kind about identity, reinvention, disappointment, resilience, love, and the strange grace of finding your own voice later than expected.

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Making a Scene Presents - The Song You Already Own May Be Your Best Investment

For most of the history of the record business, artists were trained to think about music in release cycles. You wrote a song, recorded it, released it, promoted it for a few months, crossed your fingers, annoyed your friends with social media posts, and eventually moved on to the next record. The old album was pushed toward the back of the shelf while everybody chased whatever was supposed to happen next.

The financial world has been looking at music very differently. Investors, publishers, labels, private equity firms, royalty companies, and catalog buyers increasingly look at a song not simply as something that was released three years ago, but as an asset capable of producing income for many years into the future. That difference in thinking is enormous, because once you stop treating your catalog like yesterday's news, you start asking very different questions about what the music you already own could be doing for you.

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