Indie Artist Music Hustle
Indie Artist Music Hustle Podcast with Blonde Intelligence is where you will experience exquisite cranial repertoire. The podcast (Available on your favorite podcasting platform) provides entertainment news, thoughts on celebrity gossip, independent music artists, as well as businesses that contributor to the music and entertainment industries. The purpose is to provide exquisite cranial repertoire. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button!!!! follow me @BlondeIntelligence @RRoneice. Also the channel name is That Blonde Broad.
Indie Artist Music Hustle
From Bedroom Recordings to Album Release: Lindsey Ferguson's Journey
Welcome to this week's Indie Artist Music Hustle with Blonde Intelligence. I am your host, Ms. Roni, and I always seek to give you exquisite cranial repertoire. Ever wondered what happens when musical passion meets life's unexpected turns? Lindsey Ferguson's story captivates as she reveals the winding path that led to her debut album "Being a Girl" on this episode of Indie Artist Music Hustle.
Lindsey takes us from her early songwriting days at age 11 through her music business education at NYU, where she gained crucial knowledge about distribution, royalties, and promotion strategies that many independent artists miss. She offers a fascinating comparison between the New York and Los Angeles music scenes—noting that while both cities overflow with talent, LA's physical spaciousness creates more opportunity for meaningful artistic connections and collaborations.
The heart of our conversation unveils the deeply personal journey behind "Being a Girl." Lindsay's album chronicles her evolution from struggling with dating in New York City to completing her master's degree during pandemic isolation (celebrating her virtual graduation alone in her childhood bedroom) to falling in love with a producer who taught her production skills over Zoom. That creative partnership blossomed into both romance and artistic collaboration when she moved to Los Angeles, forming "Ned and Wendy the Band" with her now-fiancé.
We dive into the tension many artists feel between creative authenticity and marketing demands. Lindsey candidly admits that social media pressures initially deterred her from fully committing to music, though she's now reluctantly embraced platforms like TikTok while maintaining her artistic integrity. Her approach balances building a genuine online presence while acknowledging the practical necessities of music promotion.
Listen to "Being a Girl" on all streaming platforms and follow Lindsey's musical journey on Instagram @lindseybinsey95 or YouTube at Lindsey Ferguson Music. Whether you're an aspiring musician or simply love hearing stories of creative resilience, this episode offers both practical wisdom and heartfelt inspiration. Remember to follow me @BlondeIntelligence or hit me on the website for questions, scheduling, or to cop your merch at www.Blonde-Intelligence.com.
Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's Indie Artist Music Hustle with Blind Intelligence. I'm your host, ms Ronnie, where I always seek to give you exquisite cranial repertoire. This week we have a very special guest. We have Ms Lindsay Ferguson. Say hello to everyone.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Ronnie Hi.
Speaker 1:How are?
Speaker 2:you doing? I'm doing. Well, I've been promoting the release of my new album, being a Girl, this past weekend, and so I've been kind of on the computer or on my phone pretty much non-stop for the past several days. So we're getting a little overwhelmed, but happy.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, what we're going to do is we're going to start out with letting you tell everyone a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:Sounds great. So I'm a 26-year-old singer-songwriter. I live in Los Angeles with my fiancé, jordan. He and I are also in a band called Ned and Wendy the Band. I started making music for fun when I was like 11 years old. I've been writing songs for as long as I can remember and after I graduated from college I moved to New York City where I got my master's in music business at NYU and while I was doing that I was working on some of the songs that are on the album that just came out, and that was actually how I connected with my now fiance and then, during quarantine, decided to move to Los Angeles to live with him and start our band, and it's just been sort of a musical whirlwind for the past two years or so and I'm really excited to have put out my first album after all of that.
Speaker 1:I feel really good about it okay, so tell me this I interviewed another artist once and she told me that she felt like Los Angeles was very congested and people trying to make it in different aspects of the entertainment industry. So do you think, coming from New York, coming from New York, do you think that between both places, which place is the best place for a new artist to start their career?
Speaker 2:oh, okay, that's I think. I think it really. I think in part it depends on the kind of music that you're making, um, and I mean, I I'm honestly not entirely sure right now what, what kind of genres or sounds would would work best in what city. But I know, at different times, you know, you've had more of like an underground, you know punk scene in New York and meanwhile you've got sort of like you know the hippie music and then moving forward, then you have more of like a hip hop, you know sound in LA with like indie in New York cities. But I guess what I've found is that I think, because there is a little more space in LA, there's still a ton of people and we're all kind of trying to do the same thing, but like physically, there's more space.
Speaker 2:Um, when you do come into contact with people, I think there's there's more time that people put into getting to know each other, whereas in New York everything's very crowded, there's people all around, you're moving at a much faster pace. So sometimes I think personal connection, which can also be a creative connection, can be, you know, missed in that city, and I think for me that's been the the biggest like positive of living in LA has just been that people take more time to connect with each other, and that's been really helpful as an artist okay, so tell me this I know you told me that you started doing music as a hobby when you were 11 and that you moved to LA to be in a band.
Speaker 1:So, with this being your first project, have you ever done anything else as a solo artist outside of a band, or is being in a band a brand new thing for you?
Speaker 2:um, yeah, I I've, as as a solo artist. Um, I've released several singles before this album. Um, I recorded a live album when I was in london a couple years ago and you know I've played. I I was in London a couple years ago and you know I've played live at a couple of small venues, specifically in New York. I've played at like Pianos and Rockwood and Arlene's Grocery, which are all kind of like East Village spots for young artists.
Speaker 2:This is my first time having moved to LA. This is my first time being a part of a band and that's an entirely new experience, because I think before I was in a band, making music felt more like just something I've always done and not quite a hobby. It's more, you know, a part of me than that. But now, being in a band, there's a little bit more intention, a little more planning. You know, working with another artist, collaborating, it's not just kind of the, it's not just the stuff that just comes out of me on a regular basis. You know it's it's it's it's more of a practice and you know it's like a sport. You know I'm not just really, you know I'm not just someone who happens to be good at, you know, dribbling a basketball when I'm playing around with it. Now it's like I have to practice the drills, I have to figure out the offense and the defense and it's, I think it's been really. I think that's been really good for me as an artist.
Speaker 1:Tell me how do you think your background in music business has helped you as an artist. Well, I mean well, wait a minute, let me let me back up, help you as in not making some common mistakes that you see other new artists make yeah, yeah, it's, it's.
Speaker 2:It's been very, very helpful in that way, um. So again, you know, I just released, um, my my first big album as a solo artist, and I've done all of the marketing for it, all of the promotional content, all the outreach, um, and the courses that I took in my master's program really helped me with, kind of like the first steps. You know, figuring out what are all the outlets that I can send my music out into, what are, what are, you know, areas that I hadn't thought about before, that I hadn't thought about before, like, you know, pr I hadn't thought about, you know, press releases when I was releasing my singles, when I was early, whenever I was younger, and so, you know, I started looking into pitching to music blogs, which led me to this really cool site called Musosoup. I don't know if you've heard of it. I have a feeling it's probably much more common than I ever realized, um, but you know what?
Speaker 2:there's several of them oh yeah, maybe I should. Maybe I should try a couple more, but uh, you know, looking into something like that was really helpful, you know, knowing it's not just about posting on my own social media, um, and then you know, distribution can be a complicated thing. Figuring out how to get your royalties, making sure you're also collecting publishing royalties and not just the recording royalties. You know it's almost impossible to make any money as a musician anymore unless you're playing a lot of live shows. So to make sure that you're, you know, getting revenue from all possible streams is really important. Don't forget about your merch sales.
Speaker 1:What'd you say Don't forget about your merch sales. What'd you say? Don't forget about your merch sales.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, well, I actually I did. I made merchandise, I used Shopify to set up an online merchandise store and that's been helpful. So, yeah, it's been fun kind of thinking strategically and coming up with, like an overall creative plan for how to get music out there, how I want to be represented as an artist and also just like creating the artwork around the album. It's been really fun.
Speaker 1:Tell me a little bit more about your album.
Speaker 2:So yeah. So the album started when I was living in New York city. I was getting my master's degree. I was a decree degree. I was a single woman doing the online dating thing, having a hard time and eventually COVID. So you get in the album to kind of travel with me back home to live with my parents. I actually finished my master's degree online.
Speaker 2:I had my graduation ceremony I experienced while sitting in my childhood bed by myself. I remember I asked my dad if he wanted to watch and he asked how long it was and I told him and he was like that's okay, so I just sat in my room by myself while I graduated from my master's program and finished school. I did throw my little hat up in there. We got hats, so that was good, um, so during that time that I was at home, I kept writing and I had never, um, tried to produce any of my own music before. I'd always sought other producers to work with or thought that songs that I recorded on my own weren't, um, you know of the quality of music that I could actually release. So I invested in a microphone and a DAW and I got Logic and I started trying to produce my own music and at that time I was in touch with a producer who I had worked with remotely before and over FaceTime and Zoom. He started giving me kind of lessons in how to produce and we ended up falling in love and so that's all, that's all in the album, love and uh. So that's all, that's all in the album.
Speaker 2:And so then from my parents house I moved to Los Angeles where that producer was already living, and he and I moved into a house together and the final several songs of the album are songs that I wrote and recorded and produced or co-produced with my fiance from our house that we're in now in Los Feliz. So you get sort of this, you know full story, not full story in my life, of course, but kind of a story of a young woman who's, you know, dealing with a lot of the you know daily struggles that we deal with. You know daily struggles that we deal with and you know I, and then of course the non-daily struggles, like COVID, but of course we all deal with that too. And I think you know it's such a long album because I've been recording these songs not knowing how I would release them, but when there was finally a feeling of resolution in my own life. That's whenever I knew it was. It was ready to go out into the world. So you know it's, it's, it's a journey.
Speaker 1:The album so you would say that the album is more you into your life yeah, yeah it's.
Speaker 2:It's a very, it's a very intimate album. Um, it's very personal, but I do think that because it gets so specific and so personal that there are actually really um kind of like tangible experiences and feelings that that listeners can can connect with are there any songs that you cook from the album? Um, well, I mean, there are so many songs that I have written um over the last four years and a lot of them the majority of the songs that I've that I've made are not in the album.
Speaker 1:Um talking about all the songs that you made. But you know how, when you go through all of the songs and you'd be like, okay, this made the cut for the album, then we're gonna have a final cut. And you come to the final cut and be like, yeah, so were there any songs that you had to cut from the album?
Speaker 2:um, I'm trying to think I once I really once I decided I was certain that I wanted to release it as an album, um, and not just break it up into smaller eps, and I and I put the album together. I think everything that I I included in the first run is still on there, okay tell me about social media.
Speaker 1:I have heard they call the beast. I have heard of and called time consuming and people just get other people to do it. What is your personal take on social media as being an artist?
Speaker 2:um, it's honestly the it's a large part of the reason why I quit off um committing fully to being an artist for as long as I did, why, I mean, I think when I was in grad school, especially because it was a music business program, so many of the professors were talking about music from the business perspective, from making money from data, and everything was social media. Social media, they need to have this many followers and this, this many likes and and they need to have a brand and and look this way and this aesthetic. And I was so not into that and, um, I and I felt really, um, really disheartened by that, by this idea that, okay, well, if I want to be a music artist, then I have to commit all my time to social media, but I really just want to make music and, um, I think recently, I mean it has for the past, you know, month, that's absolutely been the case. I have been completely consumed by social media and, you know, I'm really excited for the day when I can hire someone to do it for me. But right now, you know, I think I, now that I, now that I am putting myself out there as an artist, I want to make sure that the foundation of you know these sites where you're seeing who I am, how I'm presenting myself. I want to make sure that I have control over that and that you know what is being put out into the world is really coming from me.
Speaker 2:You know what is being put out into the world is really coming from me and then at some point, you know I can hand it off with something that's already you know kind of in the shape that I'm looking for and say, yeah, just continue with this. And yeah, I just got a TikTok, like five days ago. I put that off for a really long time because I also I'm I'm very like, sensitive to noises and things and I find TikTok to be incredibly overstimulating and I hate how, if I open it, it just starts playing immediately. Um, that are your settings. I can, I can fix that. Yes, I'm learning so much. I gotta fix that because it seems like a kind of unavoidable, uh, necessity as far as like promoting yourself as an independent artist. But I I also hate being on it okay, well, I thank you for coming.
Speaker 1:I want you to tell everybody your social media handles how they can find you the name of your album, your latest single, anything else that you would want to tell us about Lindsay okay.
Speaker 2:So I am on Instagram at lindsaybinsey95 Lindsay Okay. Um, so I am on Instagram at Lindsay Binsey. Nine five, uh. L I N D S E Y B I N S E Y underscore. No, there's no underscore. I'm sorry, just go straight to the nine five. I'm too much social media. There's too many different things. Um, you can find my band on instagram at ned and wendy underscore the band, and that's n-e-d-a-n-d-w-e-n-d-y underscore the band. Um, I'm on tiktok Ferguson Music, I think, and I'm also on Facebook as Lindsay Ferguson. You can find my music on your preferred streaming platform. My newest album is called being a Girl, and I'm also on youtube as lindsey ferguson music, and I guess all I would like to leave you with is uh, I really do, uh, implore you to listen to the album. I think that any listener will be able to find something to connect with in it and, if nothing else, it is an hour of getting some sort of understanding of what it means to be a girl you heard her.
Speaker 1:You can find her on all streaming platforms. You can find her at lindsey ferguson music, on YouTube, facebook and her Twitter and, I'm going to assume, instagram. You can find us on the podcast, on all your podcasts and preferred podcasting platforms. Find us on YouTube, facebook, instagram and on the website at wwwblonde-intelligencecom. Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Bye.