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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. http://www.makingascene.org

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. http://www.makingascene.org

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? http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - When the Streams Lie: Washington Is Finally Looking at the Real Cost of Music Streaming FraudThe 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. http://www.makingascene.org

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. http://www.makingascene.org

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." http://www.makingascene.org

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. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Smart Tour Starts at Home: Building a Local Music Scene and a Regional Touring Business That Actually Makes Money Why independent artists should stop measuring success by miles traveled and start building a music economy in their own backyard. The Great American Touring Myth Somewhere along the way, the music industry convinced independent musicians that success was measured by how far they could drive a van before somebody needed a shower. The mythology is practically woven into the fabric of popular music. You record an album, scrape together enough money for a vehicle that may or may not survive another inspection, load it with instruments and musicians, and head out across America in search of fame, fortune, and a truck stop with reasonably clean bathrooms. If you are particularly ambitious, you might even print a tour poster displaying fifteen cities in eighteen days, giving everyone the impression that your career is exploding. Never mind that the drummer is sleeping on somebody's couch in Cleveland, the bass player has developed an intimate relationship with gas station burritos, and the band's entire profit from last night's show disappeared into the fuel tank somewhere outside Columbus. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Next Music Industry Middle Class Will Be Built Around Relationships That Survive the Platform The music industry has become remarkably good at collecting information about fans, tracking transactions, and creating new ways to sell music. Unfortunately, the people making the music are often the last ones allowed to benefit from all that information. As AI, Smart Media, blockchain payments, and fan loyalty systems reshape the business, independent artists have an opportunity to change who controls the relationships that make music valuable. The Music Business Has a Relationship Problem There is something wonderfully absurd about the modern music industry. We now have artificial intelligence that can create remarkably convincing recordings, algorithms that can predict which song somebody might enjoy next, and technology that allows a piece of cardboard with a tiny electronic chip to unlock an entire interactive album experience. Streaming services can measure listening activity across enormous global audiences, while sophisticated ticketing systems can identify fans who qualify for special concert access based on their listening habits. We have managed to develop some extraordinary tools, yet an independent musician can still perform in front of several hundred enthusiastic people on Saturday night and return home Sunday knowing almost nothing about the audience that just spent two hours cheering for them. Apparently, teaching a computer to imitate a symphony orchestra was easier than giving the guitar player a reliable way to stay in touch with the people who bought tickets. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The American Music Tourism Act Is Now Law. Indie Artists Should Pay Attention to What Happens NextWashington Has Officially Discovered That Music Makes People Travel On October 9, 2026, President Donald Trump signed the American Music Tourism Act of 2025 into federal law. That sentence sounds like the sort of thing that normally causes musicians to politely nod, return to restringing a guitar, and assume somebody in Washington has once again created a committee to discuss creating another committee. This time, however, independent artists, venues, recording studios, festivals, local music organizations, and the communities surrounding them may want to keep reading. The law does not hand musicians checks, create an artist grant program, or magically turn the neighborhood club into a federally funded cultural palace. What it does is formally place music tourism inside the federal government's travel and tourism strategy, and the language Congress used is broad enough to include far more than America's famous musical landmarks. The White House confirmed that President Trump signed S. 195 into law on Friday, October 9, directing the Department of Commerce to promote domestic and international tourism to American locations and events important to music tourism. Read the White House announcement http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Reverend Raven A musician is only as good as the last gig, and a career is measured less by a list of names than by the people in the room, the groove onstage, and whether the audience leaves smiling. Still, the story is worth telling. Born and raised in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, Chief Raven found the blues in 1971 after seeing Freddie King perform at the Kinetic Theatre in Chicago. That moment set something in motion that never really stopped. After serving 16 years in the U.S. Navy, he moved to Milwaukee and began building a life around the music that had grabbed him years earlier. In Milwaukee, Chief Raven developed a long friendship and musical partnership with Madison Slim, the veteran harmonica player known for his work with Jimmy Rogers. That collaboration lasted roughly a decade and became an important part of Raven’s musical life, placing him in the company of players deeply connected to the Chicago blues tradition. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - 25 Smart Media Products You Can Actually Build for Your Merch TableHow to Turn Ordinary Merch Into Physical-Digital Collectibles Without Setting Fire to the Tour Budget The first generation of Smart Media Albums has arrived, and now comes the much more interesting question: what can an independent artist actually make with this stuff? That question matters because nobody needs another technology looking for an excuse to exist. The music business has already provided artists with enough revolutionary tools that somehow require a monthly subscription, three passwords, a tutorial video and the patience of a Buddhist monk before anybody earns twelve dollars. Smart Media becomes interesting when we stop treating NFC as the product and start treating it as the invisible doorway inside a physical object a fan genuinely wants to own. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - The Album Is Not the Object AnymoreHow Indie Artists Can Turn Almost Anything Into a Smart Media Collectible For most of the recorded music business, the album had a fairly simple job description. It was the thing that contained the music. You bought the vinyl record, cassette or CD because that was how you got the songs, and the artwork, photographs and liner notes came along for the ride as part of the package. Digital music separated the songs from the object, and streaming finished the job by making the physical carrier unnecessary for listening. That sounds like terrible news for merchandise until you realize that the object has now been freed from its old job and can take on a much more interesting one: instead of merely carrying the recording, it can carry the relationship between the artist and the fan. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents - We Solved Music Distribution. We Forgot to Solve Making a Living. There was a time when one of the biggest problems facing an independent musician was simply getting a record into the marketplace. You could make a great album, spend money you probably didn't have recording it, press a few hundred CDs, load the boxes into your car and then discover that most of the record business had no particular interest in helping you put those CDs anywhere people might actually buy them. Distribution was a gate, and the people standing in front of that gate usually wanted to know who your label was, who your distributor was and whether somebody more important than you had already decided that you mattered. Independent musicians spent decades trying to get around that system, and eventually technology did something rather wonderful: it kicked a large hole in the wall. http://www.makingascene.org

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Wren and Wilde Wren + Wilde is a Minnesota folk and Americana band led by singer-songwriter Hilary Yoder, whose distinctive “smoke folk” sound blends emotional honesty, roots-driven songwriting, and a dark, smoldering atmosphere that sets the group apart within the Midwest music scene. At the heart of Wren + Wilde is a deep respect for storytelling. Their songs are built around lived experience, human connection, and the emotional tension between hope and heartbreak. Rich harmonies, earthy instrumentation, and Yoder’s expressive songwriting give the music an intimate quality, while the band’s grit and dynamic range keep it from ever feeling delicate or overly polished. http://www.makingascene.org