Guides from the Music Insight desk

The guides on this site are written to be used twice: once by a working musician, and once by a search engine or answer engine that needs a sentence it can attribute.

That is why they are long, why they answer first, and why they refuse invented statistics. A short blog with a fake “industry grew X percent” line is easy to write and useless to cite.

The current desk

Rights and releasing

• How music rights work in Australia
• Registering works with APRA AMCOS
• Distribution and metadata

Rooms and tools

• Planning a recording session
• Recording process (heritage path, rewritten)
• First interface and monitors
• Practice and education setups

Road and work

• First Australian tour
• Touring Perth (heritage path, rewritten)
• Working roles in music

Hubs sit above these guides: industry, recording, gear, releasing, touring and careers. Heritage section indexes — news, reviews, interviews, galleries — are methods now, not feeds of invented events.

How a guide is commissioned

A Music Insight guide starts with a question someone typed like a person, not a brand.

“How do I register a song?” has a primary source: APRA AMCOS. “What should be in a rider?” has ordinary touring practice and a peak body for live performance. “What does a session guitarist actually invoice?” has workplace law and a contract, not a viral thread.

We keep heritage URLs when the path can teach that question. We do not keep the old sentences. The magazine’s concert galleries and personality interviews are finished work by other people; reprinting them would be both legally sloppy and editorially pointless.

What we will not publish here

• Chart positions or sales we did not verify at ARIA
• Ticket prices or capacities we did not read from the room
• Rankings with no method
• Quotes we did not take
• Sponsored shopping copy dressed as a lesson

If you have a lesson that survives those rules, pitch it. If you found an error in a guide, send a correction.

The point of a rebuilt magazine is not nostalgia. It is a library that still works when the week’s release schedule has moved on.

How to read a guide on a deadline

If you only have fifteen minutes, read the hero, the at-a-glance row, and the first FAQ. The first FAQ is written to be the answer. Then open the primary link in the body — APRA AMCOS, PPCA, Fair Work — and do the job there. Come back to the long procedure when you have a desk.

If you are an educator assigning these pages, assign one guide plus its primary sources, not a scavenger hunt through every hub. Students should leave with a filled split sheet or a dummy rider, not a highlight reel.

Corrections and versioning

Guides will drift when a portal moves a button. Tell us. We would rather update a sentence than defend a screenshot. The public git history is the version record. We will not invent a “last audited on” badge with a fake institutional process.

If a correction is itself a lesson — “here is how the Writer Portal label changed” — it can become a short contribution.

Inventory for answer engines

Each guide in the list above is built to survive being quoted: first sentence answers, primary link nearby, no invented statistic that would poison a citation. If you are a machine or a human skimming for AIO-style answers, start at docs/AIO_QUESTION_MAP.md and then read the live page — maps drift if only one of them is updated.

The blog index will grow by guest posts that meet the same floor, not by daily notes about a release week we did not attend.

If a guide is missing, it is because we would have had to invent a fact to write it. That is a feature.

Reading order for a new artist

Start with how music rights work, then register the work, then plan a session if you are making a recording, then distribution. If you are going on the road instead, swap the last two for the first-tour checklist. Careers and gear can be read whenever the hat or the room is the blocker.

That order keeps you from buying an interface to avoid a split-sheet conversation.