Answers/Changelog

Added: two YouTube pages, and the date ASCAP stopped charging writers

September 14, 2026

Two new answer pages from the questions under my videos. Does YouTube Premium pay creators? — yes, directly, allocated by watch time and paid monthly with ad revenue, per YouTube's own creator FAQ; the page also carries YouTube's newly published pools (30% of net Premium revenue and 60% of net Premium Lite revenue from 1 February 2027), current US prices ($15.99 individual, $8.99 Lite), and the musician-specific catch that Premium Lite still shows ads on music content. It corrects my own video, which called the payout indirect. Is YouTube raising the Partner Program threshold to 8,000 hours? — yes, for new entrants from 1 February 2027 (8,000 qualified watch hours or 20 million Shorts views, still 1,000 subscribers), with existing partners keeping their status, a 31 January 2027 deadline to accept new terms, and new activity rules. This one corrects an earlier fact-check of my own: when I first checked the claim in my video against YouTube's eligibility page I could not confirm it, because the change is published on a separate page that the eligibility page links to. The video was right. Pages 28 and 46 now note the February 2027 change. The ASCAP costs page had said I did not know when ASCAP stopped charging writers $50 and would not guess; ASCAP's help centre dates the suspension to 13 February 2023 and calls it temporary, and archived copies of the page confirm the sequence, so that page now says so. Fourteen new figures were added to the verified numbers table, every one read from the organisation's own page on 14 September 2026.

Added: three answer pages from the questions under my videos

September 7, 2026

Three new pages, each written from a question that keeps coming up in comments and on camera and that nothing on this site answered directly. How far back can you claim unpaid music royalties? — every US collector's published look-back window, read from ASCAP's help centre (one survey year), BMI's Royalty Policy Manual (nine months), SoundExchange's FAQ (three years, then expiry) and The MLC's market-share page (three-year statutory hold, first distributions early 2027). Does Splice work with FL Studio, Logic and other DAWs? — the four routes into a DAW, what the Ableton Live 12.3 integration actually is, and the $12.99 Splice x Ableton Live plan. Should you finance music gear? — Sweetwater's three payment plans separated: true 0% equal-payment promotions, the six-month deferred-interest offer at a 34.99% purchase APR, and Easy Payments with its $10 and $15 fees. Twelve new figures were added to the verified numbers table, each read from the organisation's own page on 7 September 2026.

Corrected: SoundExchange does publish payment thresholds

September 4, 2026

Six places on this site said SoundExchange publishes no payout threshold, and one of them made a point of leaving the cell blank rather than quoting a number I could not source. That was wrong, and the reason it was wrong is worth stating: I had only read SoundExchange's registration page, which genuinely says nothing about thresholds. Its FAQ does. Direct deposits are issued monthly to accounts that have accrued at least $100 and quarterly to accounts with at least $10; quarterly checks require a balance of $100; anything below the line is held until it crosses it. Read on soundexchange.com/frequently-asked-questions on 4 September 2026. Every affected page and both glossary entries now carry the figures, and the practical point has been added: registering for direct deposit is what moves an account from four payments a year to twelve.

Corrected: 41.3 million Facebook plays removed from every figure on this site

September 1, 2026

The payout study, the open-data page, the payout estimator and four answer pages had used a headline of 41.98 million lifetime plays and the finding that 98.7% of plays came from social video and produced 1.6% of the money. On checking where those plays were, 41,302,112 of them — all on the "Facebook" store — turned out to be Rights Manager fingerprint matches to other people's videos: 99.99% of them have no echo on any other platform, they sit in countries where my catalog has no audience (Mexico, Argentina, Spain), and the two songs carrying most of them have 771 and 368 Spotify plays respectively. They are real royalty lines, but they are not plays of my songs. Every rate, share and headline figure is now computed from the 677,639 plays I can verify. The per-platform rates were never affected, because the contamination was confined to one store. The social-versus-audio finding survives in a smaller and defensible form: 18.7% of verified plays, 0.5% of the money. The excluded lines are still published and labelled on the data page.

Corrected: the MLC historical unmatched figure is $397 million, not $424 million

September 1, 2026

This site quoted $424 million across six pages as the accrued historical unmatched mechanical royalties transferred to The MLC in 2021. The framing was right — it was a one-time handover of a backlog, not a live pool — but the number was superseded. The MLC's own historical-royalties page states the initial value of the transfer was approximately $427 million, and that it “subsequently decreased to approximately $397 million following the finalization by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) of the rates.” The MLC's live dashboard, read on 1 September 2026, shows $397,286,418.71 across 21 digital service providers. The widely-reported $424.38 million came from the February 2021 announcements and predates the CRB rate finalisation. Every affected page now carries $397 million, names the CRB adjustment as the reason the number moved, and notes that more than $25 million of the historical pool had been matched and distributed by early 2024.

Corrected: ASCAP is now free to join

September 1, 2026

Every page on this site said ASCAP charged a $50 one-time processing fee for a writer membership and another $50 for a publisher membership. That is no longer true, and the error ran through roughly thirty-five pages including the cost comparisons and the PRO calculator. ASCAP's own application page, read on 1 September 2026, states: “Joining ASCAP is free for writers, or if you join as a writer and publisher at the same time.” The application offers three options — Writer & Publisher: Free. Writer: Free. Publisher: $50 non-refundable. The $50 now applies only if you add a publisher account separately, after already being a writer, or if you publish without writing. Every affected page has been rewritten, including the conclusions that depended on the old arithmetic — joining ASCAP as both writer and publisher no longer costs $100, it costs nothing.

Flagged: BMI no longer publishes its publisher affiliation fee

September 1, 2026

This site previously cited BMI's publisher affiliation fees as $175 for an individual, $250 for a corporation or LLC and $500 for a partnership, sourced to two BMI FAQ pages. Both of those URLs now return 404. BMI's current join page states only that a publisher applicant needs “a credit card issued by a U.S. bank for payment of a one-time processing fee” and gives no amount, and neither of BMI's downloadable publisher agreement PDFs contains a dollar figure. Third-party sources disagree with each other, so none of them are usable. The figures have been removed from the verified numbers table and the pages now say what is actually true: BMI charges a one-time publisher processing fee whose amount it does not publish, and the only way to see it is to begin an application.

Full site rebuild: 46 answer pages, 75-term glossary, topic hubs, tools, and an open data page

August 31, 2026

Every one of the original 22 answer pages was rewritten and roughly doubled in length. 24 new answer pages were added covering comparisons, royalty mechanics, step-by-step registration procedures and the business side. A 75-term glossary was built with one URL per term. The site was reorganised into eight topic hubs, and gained a Problems and Answers index, four calculators, an open data page publishing per-platform royalty rates from my own catalog, this changelog, and an RSS feed.

Corrected: BMI publisher affiliation fee

August 31, 2026

Earlier drafts of five pages stated BMI's publisher affiliation fee as approximately $150. That figure is wrong. Verified against BMI's own FAQ on 31 August 2026: BMI songwriter and composer affiliation is free, and publisher affiliation is $175 for an individual, $250 for a corporation or LLC, and $500 for a partnership. Every instance has been corrected, and BMI's own position that a new songwriter does not need to set up a publishing company is now quoted directly. SUPERSEDED 1 September 2026: BMI has since removed both of those FAQ pages and no longer publishes any publisher affiliation amount. Treat the $175 / $250 / $500 figures in this entry as a record of what BMI published in August 2026, not as current fees.

All fees re-verified against primary sources

August 31, 2026

ASCAP, BMI, The MLC, SoundExchange, the US Copyright Office, DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby and Splice fees were each checked against the organisation's own website on 31 August 2026 and dated on the pages that cite them. The Verified Numbers page lists all of them in one place.

Published: per-platform royalty rates from 45,894 royalty lines

August 31, 2026

The Open Data page now publishes measured payout rates across 48 stores from my own complete DistroKid export, June 2019 to July 2026, 677,639 verified plays. Method and caveats are stated on the page.