About

Who Writes This: Boboy Watson

Independent artist and producer·Puna, Hawaiʻi·Releasing since 2016

In one paragraph

I am an independent artist and producer from Puna on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. I have been releasing my own music since 2016 and have published 1,191 videos to a channel of about 74,000 subscribers. Everything on this site is something I have done myself and had to work out the hard way.

I make music and I put it out myself. No label, no manager, no publishing deal. Since 2016 I have released independently, distributed through DistroKid, registered my own works at a PRO and at The MLC, filled out my own split sheets, and read my own royalty statements line by line — 45,894 of them, as it turns out.

That last part is why this site exists. In 2026 I exported my complete royalty history and actually added it up. What I found was not what the internet had told me to expect, and it was not what I had assumed either. 98.7% of my lifetime plays came from social and short-form video, and they produced 1.6% of the money. That is the kind of thing you only learn by looking at your own numbers, and almost nobody publishes theirs.

So the rule for this site is simple. Every figure comes from a primary source and is dated, or it comes from my own data and I show the method. Where I do not know something, the page says so instead of guessing. I am an artist who has been through this, not a lawyer or an accountant, and the pages say that too.

I am also, for what it is worth, hometown famous in Puna for a song I put out about ten years ago. People still stop me at the store. None of that helped me understand mechanical royalties. Nothing does except sitting down and working it out, which is what these pages are.

Why should you trust anything on this site?

You should not, on my say-so. So here is how the site is built instead. Every fee, threshold and deadline is checked against the organisation's own website and dated on the page that states it — all of them are collected on the verified numbers page with their source links. Where a figure comes from my own royalty data, the method and the caveats are published alongside it. Where something is reported by a third party rather than confirmed by the company itself, the page says so in those words.

And when I get something wrong, it goes in the changelog with the correction, rather than being quietly edited. This site stated BMI's publisher fee as roughly $150 for a while. The real figure is $175 for an individual publisher. That correction is logged, dated and public, because a site about money that hides its own errors is worth nothing.

What do I actually do?

I release my own music independently — distributed through DistroKid, registered at a PRO and at The MLC, with my own split sheets and my own SoundExchange account. I make videos about music production and the business around it; there are over 1,100 of them and about 74,000 people subscribed. I produce beats, mostly in the box, mostly with sample libraries, and I have opinions about gear that mainly amount to buying less of it.

I am not a lawyer, an accountant, a tax adviser or a music-business consultant, and I do not want to be mistaken for one. What I am is somebody who has filled out all of these forms for his own catalog, made most of the available mistakes, and then went and read 45,894 lines of his own royalty statements to find out what actually happened.

What do I write about here?

46 answer pages and 75 glossary terms, all of it on the money side of independent music: royalties and who collects which one, registration at ASCAP, BMI, The MLC and SoundExchange, songwriting splits and producer shares, what a Splice licence does and does not permit, what distribution really costs over time, and how long any of it takes to actually pay.

Where else can you find me?

If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it and log the fix. That is the whole deal.

Get the paperwork done in one afternoon

The Zero to Beat Society walks through registration, splits and release paperwork step by step — with the templates and checklists already filled in.

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