The 75 Best Music Production Blogs in 2026

Most of what’s worth knowing about making records has already been written down somewhere. Engineers have been explaining their sessions in Sound On Sound since 1985. Ian Shepherd has spent years explaining why louder stopped winning. Somewhere in Attack Magazine’s archive there’s a step-by-step rebuild of the exact drum pattern you’re stuck on.

The hard part is finding the writing that’s still alive.

Blogs die quietly. The site stays up, the old posts keep ranking on Google, and nothing tells you the last new article went up in 2022. A lot of the names on other lists have stopped publishing, and a few were never really blogs at all.

Every blog below is still publishing. The ones that stopped are collected at the bottom, with what happened to each and where to go instead.

How to use this list

Don’t follow all 75. Nobody reads 75 blogs, and the producers who try end up consuming instead of making music (myself included).

Start from where you’re stuck, pull three or four blogs from that section, and put them somewhere you’ll actually see them (an RSS reader, a bookmarks folder, whatever). Swap them out when your problem changes.

• Finishing fewer than one track a month? Start with the blogs that teach you to produce, and ignore gear news completely for now. A new synth won’t finish anything.
• Tracks get finished but sound small next to your references? That’s a mixing problem. Go to mixing, mastering and loudness.
• Recording vocals or real instruments? Recording and engineering is where the people who do it for a living write.
• Plugin folder empty and the budget’s tight? Pick one feed from free plugins, samples and deals. One.
• Comfortable in your DAW and want to get faster? Find yours under DAW-specific blogs.
• About to release something? Read the business of releasing music before you upload anything.

Every entry has the same three lines up top:

One more thing on the numbers. “Posts” counts everything a site publishes, including news and deals. A site doing 30 posts a week is not 30 times more useful than one doing one. Usually the opposite.

If you only follow ten

If you want the short version, these are the ten I’d hand a producer who asked me where to start. Between them they run from drum programming to club culture.

1. Attack Magazine, for step-by-step electronic production technique
2. Sound On Sound, for the deepest technical writing in audio
3. Bedroom Producers Blog, for every free plugin the day it drops
4. Production Advice, for loudness and mastering sanity
5. Ableton Blog, for the best artist interviews of any company blog
6. Tape Op, for long interviews with the people who make records
7. CDM, for music tech with an actual point of view
8. Perfect Circuit Signal, for synth history and hardware
9. Mastering The Mix, for practical weekly mix fixes
10. Hyperbits, because you’re already here and we publish some of the longest guides on this list

And yes, we’re on our own list. More on that in a second.

Part 1 of 11 · Entries 1 to 7

Blogs that teach you to produce

The blogs in this section exist mainly to teach. A typical post walks you through one technique or pulls apart a track you probably know. If you only follow one category, I’d make it this one.

1. Hyperbits Blog

“Wait, you put yourselves at number one on your own list?”

Yep. Read this entry, then read number two, and decide whether we earned it. Here’s the honest version.

The blog is nearly 150 posts deep, and it leans toward two things: very long plugin and gear guides (the ultimate plugin guide, the reverb, delay and EQ roundups, the Kontakt library list), and the uncomfortable stuff most production blogs skip, like why producers fail and why the best producers think less. Everything is written by working producers, and the mixing and arrangement posts come straight out of the Masterclass curriculum.

We don’t publish daily. We’d rather ship one 6,000-word guide that’s still accurate in three years than five posts you forget by Friday.

Best for: intermediate producers who want depth over volume, and anyone shopping for plugins who wants the opinionated version.

2. Attack Magazine

If you make dance music of any kind, this is the tutorial library. The Technique section has been running Beat Dissected (a classic drum pattern rebuilt step by step, with audio) for over a decade, along with long-running series like Synth Secrets and Passing Notes, and the archive is enormous.

Plenty of other lists file Attack under music news, which makes me think nobody clicked past the homepage. Click into Technique and you’re reading a production magazine for house and techno producers (drum and bass too), with gear reviews and features on the side.

Best for: electronic producers who learn by looking at the screenshot and hearing the result, especially if drums or synths are your weak spot.

3. EDMProd

EDMProd’s archive is one of the deeper free libraries for electronic producers. The guides on Ableton’s stock devices and on Serum 2 run thousands of words and finish the job.

The cadence is the problem. The blog went quiet for over a year, then dropped a burst of “complete guide” posts in September 2026. Treat it as a reference library. Search it the night Operator stops making sense.

Best for: Ableton and Serum users who’d take one long, structured guide per device over twenty short tips.

4. Point Blank Music School

Point Blank is a big London and LA school, and its blog reads like one. In between the enrollment posts you’ll find short, beginner-friendly tutorials on production and DJing (and a few on getting signed), plus write-ups of the artist masterclasses they host.

“Hold on, a music production school recommending another music production school?”

Yes, because a beginner should read it, and pretending it doesn’t exist would be a strange way to earn your trust. Just know what you’re subscribing to.

Best for: beginners who want quick, listicle-style intros before they commit to a longer course anywhere.

5. LANDR Blog

Google “what is an ISRC” and there’s a decent chance LANDR is the answer you click. The whole blog works like that. Sampling law, release strategy, what a publicist does: if you need one topic explained in plain language in five minutes, it’s probably here.

The depth is entry-level by design. Intermediate producers outgrow it fast, and the “best plugins” roundups are thin.

Best for: beginners, and anyone dealing with the paperwork side of releasing music for the first time.

6. Berklee Online: Take Note

Berklee’s online arm writes with a syllabus behind it. Faculty write most of it, so theory and songwriting exercises get explained properly, start to finish. They also cover the career and health topics producer blogs skip (the hearing damage piece above is one).

Best for: producers who can hear that a chord works but couldn’t tell you why.

7. Tracklib Blog

Tracklib’s whole business is legal sampling, and the blog treats it as a craft. Clearance and chopping sit next to the history of sample-based beatmaking, with the odd fundamentals piece (how compression works) thrown in. If your tracks usually start with a record, follow it.

Best for: sample-based producers and hip-hop beatmakers.

Part 2 of 11 · Entries 8 to 13

Mixing, mastering and loudness

Mixing is where most producers plateau, and it’s also where the internet is loudest with bad advice. These six have earned the right to be listened to.

8. Production Advice

Ian Shepherd is the reason a lot of producers stopped crushing their masters. He started Dynamic Range Day, and he’s spent 15 years patiently explaining why louder stopped winning, with LUFS and streaming normalization as the receipts.

The record-by-record breakdowns (Foo Fighters, Imogen Heap, the UK Top 20) are the strongest posts. If you’ve ever argued with someone about loudness, send them here and save yourself the typing.

Best for: anyone confused about how loud a master should be, which is nearly everyone at some point.

9. Mastering The Mix

This is a plugin company blog that reads like a mixing tutor wrote it. Each post picks one problem (stereo issues, loud-but-clean masters, how to mix AI stems without them falling apart, the pre-release checklist) and works through it with plenty of screenshots.

It shows up every week, which almost nothing else in this category manages, and the product tutorials are easy to skip.

Best for: self-releasing producers who want a fix they can apply in tonight’s session.

10. Mastering.com

You might know this one as Musician on a Mission. Same team under a new name, and the old library of home-recording tutorials still lives here.

The 2026 posts are short, principle-first pieces: why your mix falls apart on earbuds, and why more reverb doesn’t add depth. They read like lesson excerpts from a course, which in this case is a compliment.

Best for: home producers who keep fixing the same mix problem and want to know why it keeps coming back.

11. SonicScoop

Justin Colletti writes the kind of mixing articles that pick a fight with conventional wisdom and usually win. Two titles give you the flavor: why you don’t need mastering (for a different reason than you’d guess), and why most gear advice is bad.

It’s strong on the why and light on the click-here-then-here. Read it when you want your assumptions checked.

Best for: intermediate mixers who already know what a compressor does and want to think better about when to use one.

12. Puremix

Puremix is a video course platform where Andrew Scheps and Michael Brauer mix real sessions on camera (Luca Pretolesi too). The blog distills those courses into short written how-tos, each technique attributed to the engineer it came from.

The names are the draw. You get a Scheps vocal trick or a Pultec mix bus move written up in 600 words, and it costs nothing.

Best for: mixers who learn best by copying specific moves from specific people.

13. Bobby Owsinski’s Blog

Bobby wrote The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook, which is probably on your shelf. The blog is his running commentary, three times a week. Mondays are a gear pick and the rest is mostly industry opinion. The podcast is the part I’d go for, because A-list engineers talk to him like a peer (he is one).

Best for: engineers who’d rather hear the business talked about by someone who’s mixed hits.

Part 3 of 11 · Entries 14 to 21

Recording and engineering

Even if you never mic a drum kit, read something from this section. The recording world is where audio writing goes furthest into the weeds, and these are the publications engineers themselves read.

14. Sound On Sound

SOS has been the reference publication for recording technology since 1985, and nothing has replaced it. The Techniques archive alone (mix breakdowns and studio interviews, plus the whole Synth Secrets series) is a better education than most paid courses, and I say that as someone who runs one.

The honest catch is the paywall. A subscription is cheap relative to what’s in it, and the archive older than five issues is free.

Best for: producers who read the manual before they open the plugin (you know who you are).

15. Tape Op

Tape Op is where you go to find out how a record got made. The interviews with working engineers and producers run long and skip the PR gloss, probably because the interviewers record for a living too.

It has a reputation as an analog rock magazine, and the Kenny Beats and Hrishikesh Hirway interviews in the current issue show why that’s out of date. Free to read online.

Best for: producers who learn more from a good session story than from a tutorial.

16. Produce Like A Pro

Warren Huart’s whole angle is studio war stories: how the drums on a famous record were actually tracked, what the monitors he’s reviewing did to a mix. The blog runs alongside the YouTube channel and usually adds the written detail the video skips.

If you produce in the box and never touch a microphone, maybe a third of it applies. That third is good.

Best for: anyone recording real instruments or vocals, and producers who want to understand how the classics were tracked.

17. Production Expert

This used to be Pro Tools Expert, and it still shows. Scroll past the Avid news to the “explained” pieces on DAW features and the opinion columns from working session engineers. The free plugin and Kontakt library roundups are handy too.

Less relevant if you live in Ableton or FL Studio, but the engineering fundamentals don’t care which DAW you use.

Best for: working engineers and DAW power users, especially on Pro Tools or Logic.

18. Home Studio Corner

Joe Gilder writes one short idea a day about home recording. A lot of them are about EQ and compression, in plain language, for someone recording real instruments in a spare room.

The daily format is either exactly what you want or exhausting. Try a week of it.

Best for: home recordists who like a small daily nudge more than a long weekly read.

19. Mix Online

Mix has been the pro-studio trade magazine for decades, and producers mostly know it for Classic Tracks: session-by-session histories of how famous records were cut, told by the engineers who were there (Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” and Pink Floyd’s “Money” are both recent). It also covers Atmos and immersive mixing more closely than most.

Best for: producers who want the story behind the records they reference.

20. Recording Magazine

Recording has covered home and project studios since that meant a four-track. The monthly featured reviews (Barefoot’s Footprint monitors and a SOMA synth this month) run long and don’t read like ad copy, and the issue features go deep on recording technique without assuming you own a console.

Best for: someone with a spare-room studio and a purchase to justify.

21. Abbey Road Institute Blog

Another school blog, and worth it for the engineer interviews (an Emmy-winning audio engineer this summer) and the studio-craft essays. “Are you mixing with your eyes?” is a short piece every producer with a spectrum analyzer open should read.

Best for: producers who want to read how a working studio thinks, without enrolling.

Part 4 of 11 · Entries 22 to 24

Free plugins, samples and deals

Three feeds that will tell you about every free plugin and sample pack the day it drops, sales included. Follow one. Following all three is how you end up with 400 plugins and no finished songs.

22. Bedroom Producers Blog

If a free plugin came out today, BPB has probably already posted it. Tomislav and the team give sample packs and DAW updates the same treatment, and write a proper description where plenty of sites paste the press release.

They’ve been at it since 2009, and two monthly features deserve their own bookmark: the deals thread and the music challenge.

Best for: anyone building a plugin folder on a budget.

23. Rekkerd

Rekkerd is the plugin sale wire. Six of its ten most recent posts were “on sale,” “free,” or “giveaway,” and that’s the point of it.

There’s no teaching here and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. Check it before you pay full price for anything.

Best for: bargain hunters who want to know what went on sale today, and nothing else.

24. KVR Audio

If a plugin exists, it’s probably in KVR’s database, which is the biggest on the internet. The news side logs every release and update, along with anything a developer gives away.

The yearly Developer Challenge is the part most people miss: dozens of free plugins built for the contest, and a few are good enough to earn a spot in your default template. The forum is huge and noisy.

Best for: plugin nerds who want to see every option before they pick one.

Part 5 of 11 · Entries 25 to 31

Gear and music tech news

The daily firehoses. Useful for knowing what exists, dangerous for your attention. Pick one.

25. MusicTech

MusicTech relaunched in 2023 and settled into being a daily read for gear and plugin releases plus DAW updates. There’s a weekly “best new plugins” roundup, and the long-form reviews and buyer’s guides are solid.

It leans toward electronic production, so between this and MusicRadar, I’d make this your daily read.

Best for: producers who want one daily read to stay current without wading through guitar news.

26. MusicRadar

MusicRadar is one of the biggest musician news sites in the world, and most of it isn’t for you. The Music Tech section catches every launch, and the tuition archive (inherited from Computer Music and Future Music magazines) still holds a deep bank of step-by-step tutorials.

Bookmark the tuition section directly. The homepage will eat your morning.

Best for: producers who also play guitar, or anyone patient enough to dig through the tuition archive.

27. Gearnews

Gearnews gets new synths and plugins up quickly and keeps the posts short, right down to firmware updates. The weekly Free Plugins and Deals columns are useful, and there’s the odd technique feature (arrangement, drums).

Best for: producers who want one quick scan a week before getting back to the session.

28. Synthtopia

Synthtopia covers every synth and music tech release, hardware and software, plus a steady stream of free plugin finds and trade show coverage. The comment sections are the real show: long-running and occasionally unhinged.

Best for: synth people who want the news and the argument in the same place.

29. CDM (Create Digital Music)

Peter Kirn has been writing CDM since 2004 and it’s one of the last music tech sites with an actual point of view. Free and open-source tools get the same billing as commercial gear, and the artist features skew experimental. The opinions are his, and he doesn’t hide them.

Best for: producers who care about the tools themselves and want to read one person’s opinion of them.

30. Reverb News

Reverb’s editorial side does gear history and artist collections well, and the video demos are nicely made. For producers that’s roughly one synth or outboard history piece a month, which is enough to keep it here. Skip the bestseller roundups.

Best for: gear people, especially if you buy used.

31. Sweetwater inSync

Sweetwater’s editorial library is enormous and better edited than it needs to be. The “how does X work” explainers (interfaces, monitors, mic types, MIDI) are clear beginner-to-intermediate gear writing, and the buying guides admit tradeoffs even when they’re selling you something.

Best for: first-time buyers who aren’t sure what an interface does yet, wherever they buy it.

Part 6 of 11 · Entries 32 to 38

Synths, sound design and hardware

For the part of your brain that wants to know how a 909 works and why a spring reverb sounds like that.

32. Perfect Circuit Signal

Perfect Circuit is a synth shop in Burbank, and Signal reads like a magazine that happens to have a cart. Long instrument histories, deep Eurorack and hardware reviews, designer interviews, and a Learning Synthesis series that could be a course.

Nothing here about mixing or arrangement. That’s not what it’s for.

Best for: synth and modular people who want long, well-written reads about instruments.

33. MATRIXSYNTH

MATRIXSYNTH runs on Blogger and posts pretty much everything: every new module, firmware update, demo video and interesting eBay listing, the day it appears. Nobody is teaching anything and hardly anyone is writing.

Synth collectors treat it like a newspaper. Everyone else can check in once a month.

Best for: hardware synth obsessives who want to miss nothing.

34. Patch & Tweak

This started as the companion site to the Patch & Tweak books (the big beautiful ones about modular and synthesis) and became a membership magazine. The writing and photography are book quality, whether it’s a deeply researched piece of synth history or a long artist interview, and modular culture runs through all of it.

You pay for it the way you’d pay for a magazine, which is worth knowing before you click through.

Best for: synth nerds who already own the books, or have them on a wishlist.

35. A Sound Effect

Strictly speaking this is a sound effects blog. It made the list anyway, because the interviews with working game and film sound designers are craft writing you won’t find on a music site. Read it for how a sound designer thinks about texture and space.

Best for: producers with a sound design itch, and anyone curious about audio post as a career.

36. Synth Anatomy

Synth Anatomy moves fast. Most new instruments land here the day they’re announced, usually with a demo video and a plain summary of what the thing does. Next to Synthtopia it has more coverage and less arguing, so pick based on whether you read the comments.

Best for: gear watchers who want the spec sheet and the demo, and can live without the comment wars.

37. Sonicstate

Sonicstate has been running since 1995, which makes it older than some of the synths it covers. The news is fine. Go for the SonicLAB and Sonic TALK video series, where instrument designers get asked engineering questions and answer them properly.

Best for: synth players who’d rather hear an engineer explain a design choice than watch another demo.

38. Roland Articles

Nobody else can write about the 808 and 909 from the inside, and that’s why Roland’s editorial site is here. Beyond the drum machine history there’s a “careers in music” series and artist pieces like the Nick Gross hybrid drumming feature.

Best for: anyone who’s ever programmed a 909 pattern and wondered where it came from.

Part 7 of 11 · Entries 39 to 51

Company blogs actually worth reading

Every plugin company has a blog. Nearly all of them are product announcements with a tutorial-shaped hat on. These are the exceptions, and even here, every technique is demonstrated with the company’s own plugin. Read around it.

39. Ableton Blog

I’d put the artist interviews on Ableton’s blog up against anything on this list, company blog or not. They run long and stay on process, and a lot of them come with a free Live Set or rack (sometimes a Max for Live device) to pull apart.

The artists lean experimental, and if you make pop, read them anyway. Strange workflows are the fun ones to steal.

Best for: Live users, and anyone who wants to read a producer explain how they work.

40. Splice Blog

Splice runs its blog like a music channel. The dwilly studio tour (he’s produced for TWICE, KATSEYE and bbno$) is the current front-page piece, and the MPC Live III walkthrough is the kind of practical gear guide it does well between the artist features. At five posts a week, it’s one of the few company blogs that feels current.

Best for: producers who like watching other producers work.

41. iZotope Blog

iZotope makes RX, and the audio repair writing reads like it. The mixing and mastering fundamentals are just as solid, and the vocal EQ guide and the mixing glossary are useful whatever plugins you own.

The RX-in-Hollywood case studies (The Bear, Fallout) aren’t for producers, but they’re a fun read.

Best for: anyone who owns an iZotope plugin and uses about 20% of it.

42. Waves Blog

Of the big plugin companies, Waves seems to put the most effort into written how-tos, and they go step by step with named engineers quoted. Vocals and low end are where it’s strongest, so think compression, de-essing, doubling, 808s and how loud a mix should be before mastering.

Best for: producers whose vocals or low end are the weak spot.

43. Universal Audio Blog

Read enough of UA’s blog and you could explain why an 1176 and an LA-2A sound different, or why an EMT plate sounds the way it does. There’s a Unison preamp explainer in there too, plus producer interviews with record-making detail.

Best for: anyone with a folder of 1176 and LA-2A emulations who wants to know what they’re pretending to be.

44. FabFilter Learn

The one entry on this list that isn’t publishing anything, kept on purpose. FabFilter Learn is a small plugin-agnostic textbook, and a very good one: wave theory, phase, timbre, EQ types, linear phase, LFOs.

Read it once, start to finish, like a course. It’s a free introduction to the science under everything else on this page.

Best for: anyone who wants to understand what EQ and compression do before buying more of either.

45. Native Instruments Blog

The A. G. Cook supersaw piece shows NI’s blog at its best: a conversation about a sound, with the product as the excuse. Most of the long-form interviews and sound design breakdowns work the same way. Posting slowed over the summer of 2026.

Best for: producers who hear a sound on a record and want to know how the artist built it.

46. Slate Digital Blog

Slate sticks to beginner-to-intermediate fundamentals like gain staging and parallel compression, plus how to build a vocal chain, and each post walks through the actual plugin settings. You’ve heard of all of it, and it’s explained correctly, which matters more than it sounds if you learned the basics from YouTube comments.

Best for: producers who want the fundamentals explained once, properly.

47. Sonarworks Blog

Sonarworks makes room correction software, so the Learn section covers monitoring and room acoustics well. The effects mixing guides go a level past “add some reverb,” and the modulation effects piece goes further than most writing on the topic.

Best for: producers mixing in an untreated room who suspect it’s lying to them.

48. Baby Audio Blog

Baby Audio has that rare thing, a company blog with taste. The hauntology piece and the one on why sample selection matters more than processing both read like a producer wrote them for other producers, and so do the lo-fi texture posts.

Best for: producers who care about aesthetics and mood as much as technique.

49. Eventide Blog

Eventide invented a good share of the delay and pitch effects everyone uses, so when the blog gets into delay and reverb (or granular processing), it’s partly writing about its own history. It posts about once a month, and each one takes a while to get through.

Best for: anyone who wants to understand time-based effects beyond the presets.

50. Kilohearts Blog

Phase Plant is a modular-style synth with a following among bass music producers, and the blog’s sound design tutorials transfer even if you’re patching the same ideas in Serum or Vital.

Best for: bass music producers, whether you own Phase Plant or not.

51. Spitfire Audio Editorial

Spitfire writes for media composers, which nobody else in this section does. The Composer Conversations series gets working film and TV composers talking about process in detail, and the library guides help if you write orchestral or cinematic music.

Best for: composers and anyone producing cinematic or orchestral work.

Part 8 of 11 · Entries 52 to 57

DAW-specific blogs

Each blog here lives inside one DAW. Skip the ones for software you don’t own, and read every word of the one you do.

52. The REAPER Blog

Jon Tidey’s per-version “what’s new” posts explain each REAPER update better than the release notes do, which matters for a DAW that ships one every few weeks. The composing and video-tools pieces are practical too.

Best for: REAPER users, whether you installed it last week or wrote half your own custom actions.

53. Why Logic Pro Rules

Chris Vandeviver posts a Logic tutorial every week, and they’re opinionated in the useful way: how to capture your own impulse responses, or what he hears go wrong in vocal comps as a mix engineer. If you’re in Logic, this could replace a couple of YouTube channels.

Best for: Logic users who’d rather read a tutorial than scrub through a 20-minute video.

54. Sonic Bloom

Madeleine Bloom is an Ableton Certified Trainer, and Sonic Bloom is her archive of Live power-user tips, Max for Live roundups and free Live Packs (an Omnichord strums pack went up this month). Slow cadence, high hit rate.

Best for: Live users who want to get faster in the DAW they already know.

55. Reason Studios Blog

Reason’s blog does friendly genre how-tos (UK garage, wavetable synthesis basics) that translate to any DAW if you squint past the Rack. Reason launched a free version in August 2026, which makes following along cheaper than it used to be.

Best for: beginners who want to see how a genre is built before they’ve settled on a DAW.

56. FL Studio News

FL Studio ships meaningful updates constantly, and Image-Line’s own news feed is the only place the company explains them. That means release notes and write-ups on new stock plugins like Kepler Exo and LuxeVerb, and it’s where the Learn FL Studio series lives.

Best for: FL Studio users who want to know what changed in the last update.

57. Cycling ‘74 Articles

Cycling ‘74 makes Max and Max for Live, and writes about them (spatial audio, generative patching) the way engineers write for each other. There have been two posts in 2026 so far, and I’d trade a month of most feeds for either one.

Best for: Max for Live users and anyone curious about building their own tools.

Part 9 of 11 · Entries 58 to 66

The business of releasing music

Production blogs mostly ignore what happens after the bounce. These don’t.

58. DIY Musician (CD Baby)

If your question starts with “how do I release this,” CD Baby’s blog probably has a current answer. Waterfall release strategies, Spotify profile setup, copyright basics and spotting a fake playlist are all there, plus what a Grammy campaign involves. Almost nothing on production, which is fine, because that’s what the rest of this list is for.

Best for: independent artists handling their own releases.

59. Ari’s Take

Ari Herstand wrote How to Make It in the New Music Business, and the blog works like a running appendix to it. Read the distributor reviews before you pick one, then the posts on your rights and on spotting scams. The strong opinions help when you’re stuck on a decision.

Best for: independent artists making business decisions without a manager.

60. Hypebot

The one thing to read on Hypebot is the Week in Review, which squeezes the business side of music into about ten minutes. It’s been aggregating music tech and independent-artist news since 2005, and the rest of the week mixes original takes (like the distribution piece above) with syndicated posts.

Best for: producers who release their own music and want one weekly check-in on the business.

61. Digital Music News

Digital Music News is fast and a little scrappy. Right now it’s following the AI music lawsuits and licensing deals more closely than most, and those stories will shape what producers can and can’t do for the next decade. The Suno and Warner story is a good example. Read it for that.

Best for: anyone who wants to know what an AI music deal means for them before the think pieces arrive.

62. Music Business Worldwide

The labels read Music Business Worldwide. It covers deals and executive moves, and it’s where the streaming numbers get broken down properly. You won’t need it every day. You’ll want it the week a platform changes its payout model.

Best for: understanding the money side of the industry you’re releasing into.

63. Music Ally

Based in London, Music Ally writes about music tech and marketing with less breathlessness than the US trade sites. Go for the AI remix and licensing stories, like UMG’s ElevenLabs deal and the EU AI Act coverage. The free daily news is plenty for most producers, and the paid reports are for people with “marketing” in their job title.

Best for: artists doing their own marketing who want to see what the labels are paying attention to.

64. Chartmetric: How Music Charts

Chartmetric sits on more streaming data than almost anyone, and this is where they write essays with it: how songs spread on TikTok, or why so many tours got cancelled this year. None of it will help your mixdown, but it might change how you think about releasing the next track.

Best for: producers curious about how music travels once it’s out.

65. BeatStars Blog

BeatStars runs the biggest beat marketplace, and the royalty explainers on its blog are the useful part (start with the MLC blackbox piece). In between you’ll find licensing and placement posts, plus stories from producers who sold a beat that turned into a career.

Best for: hip-hop and trap producers with a beat store and questions about the money.

66. Audio Mentor

Audio Mentor writes for the hobbyist who’s starting to go semi-pro. Think budgeting a studio without wrecking your finances, or getting your first thousand streams, plus a few practical pieces on remote collaboration. It’s a small site and the advice is plain, which I mean as a compliment.

Best for: producers at the stage where the hobby is starting to cost rent money.

Part 10 of 11 · Entries 67 to 73

Electronic music culture

These keep you fluent in the scene you’re producing for, which matters more than most technique blogs admit. Don’t come here for tutorials (Magnetic’s tip lists aside).

67. Resident Advisor

If electronic music has a paper of record, it’s RA: artist profiles, scene reporting, the monthly best-music lists and the RA Podcast series. The ticketing platform pays for it, and the features are still long-form when everyone else went to captions.

Best for: producers who want to know which artists and scenes are moving before they hit the charts.

68. Mixmag

Think of Mixmag as RA’s louder, faster cousin. It’s heavy on DJ interviews and festival coverage, with industry news and The Lab video sets in between. It’ll keep you current in dance music, and it has zero interest in how the music gets made.

Best for: DJs and dance producers who want the news and the gossip.

69. Beatportal

Read Beatport’s editorial site with the heads-up above in mind, and the artist Q&As and label spotlights become a useful window into what the store is betting on. The genre explainers hold up fine, and there’s the occasional producer challenge.

Best for: club producers who want to see where the genres are heading.

70. Magnetic Magazine

Full disclosure first: Magnetic’s managing editor is Will Vance, who also coaches inside the Hyperbits Masterclass. Judge accordingly.

The production tag is why it’s here. Click it and you get genre-specific tip lists (jungle and techno among them) written by a working producer, plus monthly best-tracks roundups and hardware setup guides mixed in with the usual culture coverage.

Best for: producers working in one genre who want tips written for that genre.

71. DJ TechTools

For DJ hardware and software news with an editorial opinion, DJTT is the one to read. The back catalog of controller mapping and performance tutorials is deep. Check in every month or two until it picks back up.

Best for: producers who also DJ and want opinionated gear coverage.

72. Decoded Magazine

Decoded covers house and techno culture (progressive too). Read the Five on Friday interviews, where producers mostly talk about how they work and keep the promo to a minimum. There’s also a monthly mix competition that’s a decent way to get a DJ set heard.

Best for: house and techno producers who want to read interviews with people at their own level.

73. Inverted Audio

Inverted Audio publishes long features on hardware history (the 25-year Machinedrum story is the current one) and label histories, alongside the IA MIX series. It’s the kind of writing RA used to do more of.

Best for: producers who’d read 4,000 words on a drum machine.

Part 11 of 11 · Entries 74 to 75

Not blogs, but you should know them

These two are forums that older lists keep calling blogs, and both are still worth knowing.

74. Gearspace

Still listed as Gearslutz on half the internet five years after the rename. Gearspace is where engineers argue about monitors, mics, converters and plugins at extraordinary length, and where the classifieds live. The user-written reviews are more useful than any article it ever published.

Best for: gear research before a big purchase, if you can handle the tone.

75. VI-Control

VI-Control is where media composers and orchestral sample library obsessives hang out. They’ll tell you which string library to buy, then how to script it in Kontakt once you own it, in exhausting detail. Sample library sales get spotted in the Deals sub-forum before anywhere else.

Best for: composers, and anyone who owns more than three orchestral libraries.

Frequently asked questions

How to tell if a blog is worth following

Here’s the part most lists skip. A lot of music production blogs exist mainly to rank on Google, and a lot of the rest quietly stopped years ago. You can usually spot both in about 30 seconds.

• Check the dates on the last ten posts before you trust the newest one. One fresh post can hide a year of silence. EDMProd published seven posts in a single week of September 2026 after 15 months of nothing.
• Look for a real person’s name on the byline. “Team” or “Staff” on a run of “Best X plugins” posts usually means the writing was built for search traffic. Output Mag’s 2026 posts were almost all bylined “Output Team”.
• Ask whether you could follow the tutorial with stock plugins. If every technique needs the company’s own product, it’s a product demo with a lesson attached. Those can still be useful. Just know which one you’re reading.
• Be suspicious when every title carries the current year. Musician Wave’s titles say “(2026)” while the pages underneath were last edited in 2022. (Yes, our title has a year in it too. Hold us to it.)

Blogs that stopped publishing

Blogs rarely announce they’re done. The posts stay up, the old articles keep ranking, and the homepage looks fine until you check the dates. Every site below still turns up on other “best music production blogs” lists. Here’s what happened to each one, and where to go instead.

The Pro Audio Files. Last new article April 2023. The site’s own support page calls it an archive now; the company pivoted to its Quiztones ear-training app. The old plugin roundups are still solid. For current mixing writing, go to Mastering The Mix or SonicScoop.

Pensado’s Place. The website is gone and the YouTube channel has been frozen since October 2024. Co-host Herb Trawick passed away in February 2026. The 590+ interviews are still on YouTube and still worth mining.

Recording Revolution. No new post since August 2022. Graham Cochrane’s output is on YouTube now. Home Studio Corner covers the same home-recording ground daily.

Cymatics. The production blog stopped in September 2023. The company is very much alive on YouTube and in its sample store; the blog was always a lead-in to the packs.

Pyramind. The school merged into Music City Accelerator in May 2025 and the blog no longer exists. The domain now points at the founder’s personal brand.

Sonic Academy. Last blog post December 2024, and it was SEO listicles before that. The video courses carry on without it.

Loopmasters. The articles section hasn’t had anything new since late 2023, and what’s there is reprinted magazine reviews of their own packs. Their education moved to Loopcloud and Producertech.

343 Labs. The weekly Pro Tip Friday newsletter blog stopped in January 2025. The school itself is still running in New York and Berlin.

XLR8R. Paused operations indefinitely in December 2024 and has published one obituary since. The homepage still advertises a subscription that no longer exists. Twenty years of features and the podcast archive are still online.

Hip Hop Makers. Effectively abandoned. One post in the last year, and it advertised the owner’s WordPress theme. The old free drum kit lists still rank on Google, which is how people keep finding it.

The Samplecast. The reviews and tutorials stopped around 2019. It has posted one Black Friday deals list a year since, most recently December 2025, which is why it still looks alive at a glance.

Musician Wave, Musician Tuts, Housefox Studios. Dormant since 2024, 2025 and 2020 respectively. Musician Wave is worth a specific warning: its titles auto-update to say “(2026)” while the articles underneath were last edited in 2022 and 2023.

Fact Magazine. Still alive, just no longer a music blog. Since 2020 it’s a bi-annual print magazine and an art platform based at 180 Studios in London, and the 2026 posts are exhibition announcements. The 2008 to 2020 archive is still great.

Cosmic Academy, Producer Sphere, Black Ghost Audio, Warp Academy. They turn up on plenty of other lists. Cosmic Academy and Producer Sphere last posted in 2022, Black Ghost Audio in late 2023, and Warp Academy’s blog URL no longer resolves.

Finish More Music and Behind The Speakers. A specific warning: parts of both domains have been hijacked and now serve gambling spam. Don’t follow old links to either.

Ask.Audio. We couldn’t verify it either way. Every route in, including a normal browser, hit a bot wall that never cleared. Search results suggest the article feed stalled around 2024.

Renamed or moved

If a bookmark from an old list isn’t working, this is probably why.

• Gearslutz became Gearspace in March 2021
• Musician on a Mission became Mastering.com
• Pro Tools Expert became Production Expert
• Point Blank Plus folded into the main Point Blank blog
• iZotope Learn became the iZotope Community Blog
• puremix.net is now puremix.com
• reaperblog.net is now reaper.blog
• residentadvisor.net is now ra.co

Gone quiet, check back

Three blogs that were publishing earlier in 2026 and have since gone quiet. Not dead yet.

• Output Mag: nothing since June 2026, and the 2026 posts were plugin listicles, a long way from the artist interviews it used to run
• ADSR Sounds tutorials: nothing since December 2025. The synth-specific video archive (Serum, Massive, Pigments) is still useful
• DJ TechTools: on the list above, but silent since mid-July 2026

Read less, finish more

Here’s the uncomfortable part of publishing a list like this.

I’d stand behind every blog above, and reading all of them still won’t make you a better producer. I’ve watched a lot of talented people (myself included, for a while) build an elaborate reading habit as a way of not sitting down with the track that scares them.

So pick three. Maybe five. Put them somewhere you’ll see them once a week, and give the rest a miss until your problem changes.

Then change how you read them.

Good: bookmarking one of Attack’s Beat Dissected breakdowns.
Great: rebuilding that drum pattern in your DAW tonight and checking it against their audio.

Good: reading Ian Shepherd on why Spotify’s limiter sounds bad.
Great: dropping your last master into a loudness meter and hearing what streaming normalization actually does to it.

Good: reading Mastering The Mix’s guide to stereo problems.
Great: flipping your current mix to mono tonight and fixing whatever disappears.

And when you catch yourself reading about compression for the fourth time this month, the reading has stopped working. At that point, what helps is someone qualified listening to your track and telling you specifically what’s wrong with it. That’s what the Hyperbits Masterclass is built around. Grab the free training below first and see how we teach before you decide anything.

Know a blog that should be on here? Tell us and we’ll take a look.