One of the great things about getting older is that you begin to more easily see the big picture. It’s like going from ground level to suddenly being up in the air at 10,000 feet. Suddenly you perceive things in a whole new way. Below are a few of the things that really don’t matter […]
Continue reading
On this week’s episode, veteran producer, engineer, and Grammy nominee Bruce Sugar explains why staying relevant means embracing new tools without sacrificing the feel and emotion that make music connect. Bruce shares how a short engineering gig with Ringo Starr became a working relationship spanning more than two decades, how artists like Ringo and Joe […]
Continue reading
On this week’s episode, I break down how shifting ownership, AI adoption, and changing platform policies are reshaping the music business and professional audio landscape. I’ll examine major industry moves involving iZotope, Plugin Alliance, Native Instruments, Dynaudio, and DistroKid, alongside the Hollywood Bowl’s immersive sound upgrade and D’Addario’s controversy over undisclosed AI use. I’ll also […]
Continue reading
On this week’s episode, Tour managers and artist teams: see why logistics without leadership burns an artist’s budget, with FOH engineer Ryan Goldbacher. Ryan traces his path from Blackbird and Dark Horse Recording, including setting up microphones for a young Taylor Swift in 2006, to Shooter Jennings, where he admits he struggled on his first […]
Continue reading
YouTube is increasingly becoming more and more important to artists, producers, songwriters, and podcasters, as the service is now the most watched platform in the world (yes, even more than Netflix). That said, the way it counted views was different from the way every other video platform counted them. Now the company says that’s all […]
Continue reading
On this week’s episode, reliable music data is getting harder to access, and Oskar Eichler explains why the artists and companies that know how to interpret it now have a serious advantage. As CEO of Songstats, Oskar has helped build a real-time music analytics platform that tracks streaming, playlist, chart, radio, and social media performance […]
Continue reading
On this week’s episode, indie plugin developers who want to launch a genuinely new synthesis tool will recognize their own blind spots in Evan Mezeske’s story. Evan left Google after 11 years building large-scale fraud systems to create Anukari, the first commercially available 3D physics modeling synthesizer that runs in real time. He discovered that […]
Continue reading
As everyone knows, there are a lot of songs on Spotify, probably more than you can listen to in a hundred lifetimes. I’ve never heard anyone having a problem with that. What we all have a problem with is when AI-generated slop music tracks fill up the pipeline and push legitimate artists out of the […]
Continue reading
On this week’s episode, you’ll hear how audio plugin developers who assume machine learning is the right tool find the process used by Hannes Andersson and the team at Oeksound genuinely surprising. Hannes is CEO of Oeksound, the creator of Soothe, the dynamic resonance suppressor that became so dominant on Spotify’s Top 50, yet it’s […]
Continue reading
Song copyright protection for musicians who record ideas with a voice memo at 3am proves nothing in a dispute. That original moment completely unverifiable. On this week’s podcast episode, I speak with Nadim Rahman about Songproof, a dual-blockchain platform that recognizes that musicians needed an irrefutable timestamp at the exact moment inspiration strikes, not after […]
Continue reading
For the longest time music was placed into pre-determined buckets that pretty much worked. Pop, Hip-Hop, Rock, EDM, Latin, Country, K-Pop, R&B/Soul, Indie/Alternative and Classical have been the buckets that dominated music all over the world. But if you drill down a bit, you see a host of hybrid genres that shows where the excitement […]
Continue reading
Music industry professionals still betting on major labels to develop artists should know the system has structurally exited that business. On this week’s podcast episode, I break down the data showing UMG and WMG now redirect spending toward catalog acquisitions rather than new careers. . . . . . have made AI licensing deals explicitly […]
Continue reading
If there’s one thing that most of the music industry agrees on, it’s that songs that are AI-generated should be labeled. The amazing thing is that there’s finally a full industry push to do so. According to the Wall Street Journal, the RIAA and IFPI are leading push to get AI-generated tracks labeled across the world’s streaming services, with […]
Continue reading
On this week’s podcast episode, mastering engineer Jeff Graves talks about what happens when independent musicians upload masters that are so hot that they lose transient detail the moment streaming platforms apply loudness normalization. Jeff spent two and a half years measuring 214 audio fingerprints across 15 samples per genre to build a 24-stage AI […]
Continue reading
On this week’s podcast 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 […]
Continue reading