Transparency

Changelog & Corrections

What changed on this site, when, and what was re-verified against which source. Corrections are logged here rather than quietly edited, because a site about money that hides its own mistakes is not worth reading.

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.

Clarified: the $424 million MLC figure

August 31, 2026

The widely-quoted $424 million refers to the accrued historical unmatched mechanical royalties transferred to The MLC by the digital services when it launched in 2021. It is not a live pool sitting there today. Pages that referenced it now say so.

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 49 stores from my own complete DistroKid export, June 2019 to July 2026, 41.98 million plays. Method and caveats are stated on the page.

How freshness works here. Pages carry a "last verified" date, not a "last touched" date. The build refuses to bump a date on a page whose content has not actually changed, so an old date on a page means the page genuinely has not been revisited — which is more useful to you than a date that lies.

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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