Bobby Owsinski, author and host of Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle, breaks down how shifting ownership, AI adoption, and changing platform policies are reshaping the music business and professional audio landscape. Bobby examines 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. He also looks at the growing challenge of defining a...

Tour management can burn through an artist’s budget fast when logistics replace leadership, and Ryan Goldbacher, a tour manager and front-of-house engineer, explains what the job actually demands when an artist’s money, crew, and reputation are on the line. 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 tour management run and may have cost the arti...

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 across major platforms. Songstats now serves 10,000 active artists and provides data to major booking agencies, distributors, management companies, and labels. Oskar explai...

Indie plugin developers who want to launch a genuinely new synthesis tool will recognize their own blind spots in Evan Mezeske's story. 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 technical originality ...

Audio plugin developers who assume machine learning is the right tool will find the process used by Hannes Andersson and the team at Oeksound genuinely surprising. Andersson is CEO of Oeksound, the creator of Soothe, the dynamic resonance suppressor that became so dominant on Spotify's Top 50, yet it's team rebuilt the algorithm from scratch. Oeksound's secret is two people in a room listening for hours until the math feels right, a standard that quietly shaped the sound of a lot of re...

Song copyright protection for musicians who record ideas with a voice memo at 3am proves nothing in a dispute. That original moment completely unverifiable. Nadim Rahman built Songproof, a dual-blockchain platform, after recognising that musicians needed an irrefutable timestamp at the exact moment inspiration strikes, not after the fact. For 99 cents per song, Songproof issues what Rahman calls a birth certificate for your music, anchored to the blockchain, so that if a collabo...

Music industry professionals still betting on major labels to develop artists should know the system has structurally exited that business. On this week's episode I break down the data showing how UMG and WMG now redirect spending toward catalog acquisitions rather than new careers. . . . . . have made AI licensing deals explicitly designed to reduce artist relationships. . . . . . and then kept the copyright settlement money those deals generated without passing any of it on to t...

Independent musicians sometimes upload masters that are too hot, so they lose transient detail the moment streaming platforms apply loudness normalization. Mastering engineer Jeff Graves spent two and a half years measuring 214 audio fingerprints across 15 samples per genre to build a 24-stage AI mastering platform, and in this conversation he explains exactly why delivering at the target LUFS level protects the dynamics and clarity that make a song translate from earbuds to car speakers.&nb...

On this week's 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 radio chart results as an independent artist. Darlene, a veteran of over 1,000 studio sessions and 14 self-produced solo albums, separates cre...

Music career longevity is what separates artists who last from those who burn out chasing the wrong metrics. Too many aspiring musicians hand control to social platforms, grinding out content as servants to algorithms while the industry gaslights them with success measures that have nothing to do with real longevity. Keith Jopling spent 25 years inside the business, including time at Spotify, then interviewed 80 artists and bands to write Riding the Rollercoaster, and the creative director m...