From the Publisher

We Built a Network Because Nobody Was Coming to Get Us.

Kimberly Johnson  ·  Founder & Publisher, MBSGG Global Network

There is a particular kind of grief I have watched settle over a room full of good people doing faithful work. It is the grief of being unseen. An artist with a song that would wreck you, sitting on a hard drive because nobody told her what to do next.

She doesn’t have a talent problem. She has a distribution problem. And distribution is a solvable problem.

That is why MBSGG Global Network exists, why we built MBSGGTV, and why you are reading the first edition of Signal & Song. We are a network in the literal sense — television, radio, social, and now this magazine — pointed at one job: getting the people who have something worth hearing in front of the people who need to hear it.

Why this issue looks like this

We could have filled thirty pages with encouragement. Encouragement is free and it is everywhere. What is not everywhere is a straight answer to the question that is actually stopping you.

So this edition is built out of answers. Every number in it is attributed. Where the research is contested, we tell you it is contested. Where an organization would not publish a figure, we say so instead of inventing one. Where a number that is all over the internet is simply wrong — and there is a big one on page 14 — we correct it and show our work.

Here is your assignment. You are not behind because you are unsigned. You are behind because there are three organizations that owe you money and you have joined, at most, one of them. We named all three, told you what each one collects, and told you what it costs to join. Two of them are free.

What we ask of you

Read it with a pen. Take one page — just one — and do the thing it says this week. Then send this issue to somebody who needs it. That is how a network grows: not because it shouted louder, but because somebody found something worth passing on.

Welcome to Signal & Song. Let's go get your people.

Kimberly Johnson

Kimberly Johnson
Founder & Publisher  ·  MBSGG Global Network / MBSGGTV

In This Edition

Contents

Premiere Edition  ·  Fall 2026  ·  One audience, two problems: getting heard and getting paid.

The Signal  ·  Front of Book

Five Numbers That Reset the Room

The year's most consequential findings for independent artists — with the receipts.

The Artist Section  ·  Feature

Three Organizations. Three Different Checks.

One song generates several separate royalty streams, collected by different bodies that do not talk to each other and will not come looking for you. Two of the three cost nothing to join. Most independent artists have joined one — and quite a few have joined none.

Signal & Song Staff  ·  Money & Rights

Start here, because everything else depends on it: every song you release contains two entirely separate copyrights.

The Copyright Office's own teaching example is Aretha Franklin's "Respect": her recorded performance is one copyright, and the underlying song written by Otis Redding is a completely different one. Registering one does not register the other. And critically — different organizations collect on each.

Organization 1 — Your PRO

ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, or GMR. They collect public performance royalties on the composition: radio, television, live venues, restaurants, bars, the performance component of streaming, and internet use.

Cost to join as a writer: ASCAP charges a one-time $50 processing fee. BMI is free — in BMI's own words, "there are no fees or annual dues of any kind for songwriters and composers." SESAC and GMR are invitation-only and do not accept unsolicited applications.

You can only belong to one PRO as a writer, and switching later is genuinely painful: BMI requires a minimum two-year term, and ASCAP only accepts resignations in a three-month window keyed to your election quarter. Miss it and you wait a year. Choose deliberately the first time.

What your PRO does not collect: mechanical royalties, sync fees, master royalties, or the digital performance of your sound recording. That is the other two organizations' job.

Organization 2 — The MLC

The Mechanical Licensing Collective, a nonprofit designated by the U.S. Copyright Office under the Music Modernization Act of 2018. It collects U.S. digital audio mechanical royalties — the reproduction royalty owed to the songwriter and publisher every time a song is streamed or downloaded on a licensed platform.

It is free to join. The MLC states that it does not keep a portion of the royalties it collects to cover operating costs — the platforms fund its administration.

If you write songs and your music is on Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon, The MLC is holding a royalty stream for you. If you never registered your works there, it is sitting in a pool.

Organization 3 — SoundExchange

SoundExchange collects the digital performance royalty for the sound recording under the statutory license — from SiriusXM satellite radio, Pandora's non-interactive stations, iHeartRadio, webcasters, and digital cable music. More than 3,600 services.

Also free to register. SoundExchange says it operates at the lowest administrative fee of any major collective, roughly 4–6%, and has paid out more than $11 billion to date, running about $1 billion a year.

Continued from page 8

If You Own Your Masters, You Are Leaving 95% on the Table.

Here is a number worth doing something about this week. The statutory split for SoundExchange royalties is written into the law itself, at 17 U.S.C. § 114(g)(2):

An unsigned artist who owns their own masters occupies both of the first two roles. Register in both capacities and you collect 95%. Register in neither and you collect nothing, forever, while your record plays on satellite radio.

The 45% is paid straight to the artist. That is the law, not a favor.

Do these five things. This week.

• Join a PRO as a writer. BMI is free; ASCAP is a one-time $50. You get one choice — read both before you pick.
• Join The MLC and register every work. Free. Use the Portal's search-first flow so you don't create a duplicate. Title alone is technically the only required field, but a registration that actually pays needs at least one writer with a composer/author role and publisher information with a collection share.
• Register with SoundExchange — as the artist and as the rights owner, if you own your masters. Free.
• Run The MLC's Matching Tool. It shows unmatched usage associated with your registered works and lets you submit matching suggestions. This is the actual mechanism for claiming black-box money.
• Search SoundExchange's four unclaimed-royalty lists — unregistered artists, partially unregistered artists, unregistered performers, and unregistered sound recording owners.

For worship and gospel songwriters: there is a fourth stream

If churches sing your song, CCLI is a separate income source from all three organizations above, and most independent worship writers have no idea it exists.

Here is the chain. A church buys a CCLI Church Copyright License, which permits it to project and print your lyrics. Every license holder is required to report the songs they reproduce. CCLI pools the license fees and, per its own documentation, pays registered song owners twice a year.

SongSelect is the companion database that worship leaders actually search to find and legally reproduce songs. Getting into SongSelect is how your song becomes findable; being reported through the CCLI system is how it becomes payable.

Can a self-published independent register directly? Partially. CCLI states that if you self-publish, "it is possible to become a registered copyright owner with CCLI provided you meet certain conditions," and directs inquiries to its Intellectual Property department. Once a song is in regular use across multiple churches, CCLI generally recommends signing with a publisher who will handle registration.

We could not verify CCLI's registration fee, exact eligibility conditions, or royalty calculation from published sources — they are not public. Rather than guess, we will tell you to call them: 1-800-234-2446. Ask for Intellectual Property. That phone call is the single highest-value thirty minutes available to an independent worship songwriter this month.

The Artist Section  ·  Feature

Own It Before You Upload It.

Your copyright already exists — it attached the moment you hit save. Registration is a different thing entirely, and skipping it quietly costs you the only remedies worth having.

Signal & Song Staff  ·  Money & Rights

Let's clear two myths off the table immediately, because between them they are responsible for most of the bad decisions independent artists make about their own catalogs.

Myth one: you have to register to have a copyright. You do not. Copyright attaches automatically the instant a work is fixed in a tangible medium — the moment you write the lyrics down or bounce the file. No registration, no © symbol, nothing required.

Myth two: mailing yourself a copy protects you. "Poor man's copyright" is not a thing. It has never been a thing. It provides no legal benefit whatsoever.

So if the copyright is already yours, why register? Three reasons, and they are all about what happens when someone takes your song.

Reason one: you cannot sue without it

The Copyright Office is blunt: "Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration (or refusal) is necessary for U.S. works." Your rights exist. Your ability to enforce them in federal court does not, until you file.

Reason two: the three-month window

This is the one that costs people real money, and almost nobody knows the deadline.

Register before the infringement, or within three months of publication, and you become eligible for statutory damages and attorney's fees. Miss that window and you are limited to actual damages and the infringer's profits — which for an independent artist is often close to zero and expensive to prove.

Statutory damages run $750 to $30,000 per work, up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. Attorney's fees are what makes a lawyer take your case at all.

Three months from release. Put it in your calendar the day you schedule the drop.

Reason three: prima facie evidence

Registration made before or within five years of publication establishes prima facie evidence that your copyright is valid and that the facts on the certificate are true. The other side has to disprove it. That is a meaningful advantage.

What it costs right now

GRAM: the album shortcut — and the trap inside it

Group Registration of Works on an Album of Music lets you register 2 to 20 works in a single application. For anyone releasing a project, it is the most cost-effective route available.

But here is the part that gets applications rejected: you cannot combine compositions and sound recordings in one GRAM filing. The Copyright Office states it plainly — musical works and sound recordings "must be registered using separate applications."

A full album, fully protected, is two GRAM filings. Budget for both.

The other requirements, briefly: all works must be first published on the same album on the same date; all by the same author, or sharing a common joint author who contributed to every work in the group; identical claimants across all works. Previously released singles can be included if you supply the single's title, its complete publication date, and confirm the versions are identical. Photos, artwork, and liner notes can ride along with a sound recording application if they were not previously published.

Continued from page 11

Sign It in the Room.

A split sheet is a single page that takes four minutes and prevents the fight that ends friendships and freezes royalties. Here is why the law makes it non-negotiable — and a template you can use tonight.

People treat split sheets as bureaucracy. They are not. They are a defense against three specific legal defaults that will otherwise apply to you automatically, whether you like them or not.

1. Without a written agreement, co-authors of a joint work are presumed equal co-owners. Regardless of who actually did what. The person who wrote ninety percent of the song and the person who suggested one line are, by default, fifty-fifty.
2. Each joint owner can license the entire work non-exclusively without asking the others. Subject to accounting to you — but they can do it. A co-writer you have fallen out with can license the song out from under you.
3. The MLC pays on registered shares. Conflicting claims create overclaims, and overclaims freeze the money. Not delay it — freeze it, until it is resolved.

The four minutes you spend on this before anyone leaves the studio is the highest-paid four minutes of the session.

Producer points are not a publishing split — and mixing them up is expensive

These are two different copyrights and two different money streams, and they are constantly conflated:

• A publishing split is ownership of the composition, based on songwriting contribution — lyrics and melody. It generates royalties whenever the song is performed, broadcast, or licensed. Forever.
• Producer points are a share of net revenue from the master — the recording. Tied to that recording's commercial performance, negotiated with whoever is paying for it.

A producer can have both, one, or neither. Say which, in writing, before the session ends. And note that there is no universal standard producer split — it is negotiated deal by deal. If someone quotes you an industry-standard number as though it were a rule, ask them to show you where it is written down.

If you are in a band, you are in a partnership — probably without knowing it

Most independent bands operate as general partnerships by default. Absent an agreement, partners may share equally in profits and can bind one another. The recurring failure points are always the same: who owns the band name (a trademark question, entirely separate from copyright), what happens to the catalog when someone leaves, who owns the gear and the social accounts, how new members are admitted, and whether a departing member keeps royalty participation.

Band-name disputes are frequent, ugly, and expensive. The name usually belongs to whoever registered the trademark or whoever the agreement says — not, romantically, to "the band."

The Artist Section  ·  Feature

13.1¢

The Correction Almost Nobody Printed

Covers and samples are where independent artists get the worst information on the internet — starting with a royalty rate that has been wrong since 2022 and is still being republished by companies that should know better.

Signal & Song Staff  ·  Licensing

If you have researched cover songs online, you have read that the U.S. statutory mechanical rate is 9.1 cents. That number held from 2006 to 2022. It is two rate cycles out of date.

Effective January 1, 2026, the rate is 13.1 cents per work, or 2.52 cents per minute of playing time or fraction thereof, whichever is larger. It is a cost-of-living adjustment published in the Federal Register on December 1, 2025, and it applies to physical phonorecords and permanent downloads. The prior rate was 12.4 cents.

Covers: you don't need permission. You do need to pay.

Section 115 of the Copyright Act gives you a compulsory mechanical license. The songwriter cannot refuse you, provided the song has already been distributed to the public in the U.S. and you do not change its basic melody or fundamental character. This is one of the genuinely artist-friendly corners of copyright law.

But the Music Modernization Act split cover licensing into two worlds, and knowing which one you are in decides whether you owe anything at all.

Where to get one, with real numbers

Easy Song publishes its pricing: a $19.99 flat service fee per song regardless of quantity, plus $0.131 per unit for CDs and digital downloads — matching the 2026 statutory rate — and $0.24 per unit for ringtones. Minimum entry is 10 units at $21.30 total. Rates run slightly higher for songs over five minutes. Note their limitation: interactive audio streams are no longer licensable through their cover-song service because of the MMA; streaming-only releases go through custom licensing.

Songfile, operated by the Harry Fox Agency, licenses covers for physical and digital formats. Its fees are not disclosed publicly without an account, so we are not printing a number we could not verify.

DistroKid charges $12 per year per cover song and requires you to buy through them, on the stated logic that they cannot confirm the songwriter is being paid otherwise. They deduct the per-sale mechanical and remit it to Harry Fox.

YouTube covers are a different animal entirely

A YouTube cover pairs music with moving images, which makes it a synchronization use. Sync is never compulsory. There is no statutory right that forces a publisher to let you do it.

In practice, Content ID resolves most cover uploads automatically: the publisher's claim is asserted and ad revenue is redirected to the copyright owner rather than to you. Understand what that is — a monetization arrangement, not a license you hold. The publisher can still block the video, and nothing compels them to let you earn from it.

Sampling: two clearances, and there is no shortcut

To use a sample legally you need both:

1. A publishing license for the underlying song — from the publisher.
2. A master use license for the specific recording — from the label or master owner.

One without the other is not clearance. And clearance professionals interviewed by Spotify for Artists put the economics plainly: publishers commonly charge $1,500 to $3,000 as a non-negotiable fee plus a piece of the new copyright, with labels charging several thousand more. One expert described clearing a single drum loop and giving away fifty percent of the earnings. There is no central database. Allow at least a couple of months.

The Artist Section  ·  Feature

Radio-Ready

Music directors are not ignoring you. They are deleting an email that gave them a reason to. Here is exactly what goes in the one you send instead — and an honest accounting of what commercial airplay actually costs.

Signal & Song Staff  ·  Airplay

Let us start with the part nobody wants to say out loud, because it will save you a great deal of money and disappointment.

Billboard's investigation into radio and independent artists found that major labels accounted for over 85% of tracks on the year-end 2021 Radio Songs chart, despite representing 66.1% of recorded-music revenue. Campaign budgets by format run $30,000+ for Triple A, $40,000–$60,000+ for Alternative, and six figures for Top 40 and mainstream R&B and hip-hop. Twenty to forty percent of those budgets go to independent promoters who control station access. Billboard documented a $3,000 demand from a middleman for a single "add" at one Northeast station.

Two quotes from that reporting are worth sitting with. A promotion executive: "If you don't pay, you don't move up." An indie label executive: "The airwaves are designed not to be built for all. You can only come to the table if you're spending the right amount of money."

Mainstream commercial radio is not a meritocracy you are failing. It is a market you have not been invited to bid in.

Knowing that is not defeat. It is aim. Because there are formats where an independent absolutely can win, and gospel and Christian radio are among the most accessible in American broadcasting.

How gospel charting actually works — and why spins alone won't do it

Billboard's Gospel Airplay and Christian Airplay charts are audience-impression charts built on Mediabase data. Mediabase electronically monitors radio stations in more than 140 U.S. markets, and Billboard cross-references play data against Nielsen Audio ratings to estimate audience impressions per play.

The strategic consequence: a spin at 4 a.m. is not worth a spin at 4 p.m., and a large-market station moves the chart in a way a small one cannot. An independent can accumulate hundreds of small-station spins and never register. Chart strategy is about which stations and which dayparts, not how many adds you can count.

(Hot Gospel Songs is a different, mixed chart — streaming plus sales plus airplay.)

What gospel radio promotion costs

Published packages from one gospel-specific servicing company, promoting to a stated list of 1,500+ gospel radio stations and media contacts:

For non-commercial, college and community radio — genuinely open territory — independent promoters typically charge $1,500 to $10,000 plus postage. The practical advice from people who run these campaigns: don't blast all three hundred stations at once. Work in increments of about fifty so you can research and personalize. If you're mailing physical media, budget at least $800 for 300+ CDs including packaging and postage.

The submission itself

• A high-quality file with complete embedded metadata. 320 kbps MP3 is the standard. Artist name, song title, album, genre — filled in, correctly, every time.
• A clean version. Free of profanity or explicit content. Non-negotiable for daytime airplay. See the box below for why this is a legal matter, not a taste one.
• A private download link, not a giant attachment. SoundCloud, Dropbox, or a submission service. Never fill a music director's inbox.
• Never send a streaming link as your primary submission. A music director needs a downloadable file to put into rotation. A Spotify link is a dead end at the exact moment they were willing to help you.
• Your ISRC. Essential — it is how spins get tracked and attributed to you. No ISRC, no credit.
• A designated focus track and one sentence on the hook. Do not make them choose.
• Release date, label if any, genre, runtime, UPC. This data feeds chart reporting.
• Wait at least a week before following up. Once. Politely.

Your one-sheet / EPK

High-resolution press photo. A short bio and a long bio. Focus track with a positioning line. Release date and label. The full metadata block — ISRC, UPC, genre, runtime. Any press, playlist, or chart credits. Tour dates. Social and streaming links. Contact for radio and for press, separately.

Format it so a music director can decide in under thirty seconds. That is the actual design brief. Everything else is decoration.

The Artist Section  ·  Consumer Protection

The Hustle That Costs You.

Buying streams no longer just wastes your money. It now generates a recurring bill that lands on you, every month, for as long as the platform keeps flagging the track.

Signal & Song Staff  ·  Watch Your Back

There is a version of this article that scolds you for being tempted. This is not that article. The temptation is rational — the numbers are brutal, everyone else's look better than yours, and someone slides into your messages promising ten thousand plays for fifty dollars.

Here is what actually happens, mechanically, so you can decide with real information.

The €10 that keeps coming

Since April 2024, Spotify charges labels and distributors a penalty per track for flagrant artificial streaming — and the distributors pass that fee directly to the artist. TuneCore's published policy states it plainly: a monthly €10 penalty per track deemed to have high levels of artificial streaming activity, charged back to the account holder.

Read the structure carefully, because it is worse than a one-time fine:

• One flagged track = €10.
• Five flagged tracks in a month = €50.
• One track flagged across three months = €10 each month.
• There is no threshold. It applies whenever fraud detection flags the track.

Other distributors — UnitedMasters and FUGA among them — publish parallel enforcement policies.

Spotify's own position on paid playlist services: they violate its terms, they frequently use bots, and they cannot legitimately guarantee algorithmic placement. In the platform's words — "The only way to grow your career on Spotify is by gaining legitimate fans who engage with your songs."

The sync scam that uses real companies' names

The 2026 pattern is more sophisticated than the old Nigerian-prince era, and it is specifically engineered to survive a Google search. You receive an email from a music supervisor or licensing agency whose name you can look up, and which does exist. The branding is right. The copy is clean. The details are lifted from your public profiles. There is a placement waiting — contingent on an upfront "administration," "registration," or "clearance" fee.

The verification rule is simple and it works: never reply in the thread. Look the company up independently and contact them through the address published on their own website. If the offer is real, thirty seconds of delay costs you nothing. If it isn't, you just saved everything.

360 deals: the clauses to refuse

A 360 deal gives a company a percentage of all your income — records, publishing, touring, merch, endorsements, acting. Some are fair. Many are not. These are the terms to strike or walk away from:

• A perpetual term, or a term measured in "albums" with no outside date.
• Full copyright assignment in perpetuity rather than a license or a defined reversion.
• No rights-back clause at all.
• A cut of touring and merch while providing no touring or merch services.
• Cross-collateralization across all income streams — so your touring income repays your recording advance and you never recoup anything.
• No audit rights, or audit rights written so narrowly they cannot be used.
• Vague "work made for hire" language. (See page 12 — it is likely ineffective for music anyway, but it tells you what they intended.)
• Exclusivity with no performance obligations. The company can do absolutely nothing while you are locked up. This is the quietest and most damaging clause on the list.

The Artist Section  ·  Feature

More Than Half.

In June 2026, fully AI-generated tracks crossed 50% of everything uploaded to a major streaming platform in a day. Understanding what that does to your royalty check requires understanding one thing about how streaming pays — and almost nobody has explained it to you.

Signal & Song Staff  ·  The Business

First, the thing you have to know before the rest of this makes sense: there is no per-stream rate.

Spotify says so itself, in as many words: "a 'per stream' rate isn't actually how anyone gets paid — not on Spotify, or on any major streaming service."

What actually happens is a pro-rata streamshare calculation. Your streams in a market, divided by total streams in that market, equals your share of that market's royalty pool. Every "per-stream rate" you have ever read is a retrospective average — somebody's payout divided by somebody's stream count — and it varies by market, by subscription tier, by listener country, and by how big the pool was.

The 1,000-stream threshold, stated precisely

Since April 2024, a track must reach at least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months to be included in Spotify's recorded music royalty pool calculation. There is also an undisclosed minimum unique-listener requirement, to stop someone farming their own track.

Two things that get reported wrong constantly:

• It applies to recorded music royalties only. A songwriter's mechanical and performance royalties are unaffected.
• Spotify's framing: below-threshold tracks average $0.03 per month and represent just 0.5% of total streams. Redistributing them lifts payouts to eligible tracks by roughly 0.5%.

The counter-argument deserves airing too. Critics characterize the policy as a transfer from the long tail to established acts, and independent analyses have estimated roughly $46–47 million shifting away from small artists. Those are third-party estimates, not Spotify figures, and Spotify disputes the framing. We present both because you are capable of weighing them.

Worth noticing: Spotify's 2026 report no longer publishes counts for artists earning $1,000 or $10,000 — tiers it disclosed in earlier years. The lowest disclosed tier is now $100K. We are not going to invent the missing ones, and neither should anyone else.

Now the flood

Here is the connection that makes this your problem rather than an interesting statistic. Deezer reports that up to 85% of the streams generated by fully AI-generated tracks were fraudulent in 2025. AI music accounts for only 1–3% of total platform streams, against an 8% fraud rate across Deezer's entire catalog — meaning fraud is dramatically concentrated in AI uploads.

Fraudulent streams are streams in the pro-rata pool. Every one of them takes a slice of the same market pool your streams are measured against. This is not a philosophical objection to machines making music. It is arithmetic.

Platforms are responding. Spotify removed more than 75 million "spammy tracks" in a twelve-month period and, in September 2025, announced three measures: an impersonation policy prohibiting unauthorized AI voice clones, a spam filtering system targeting mass uploads and sub-30-second stream-farming tracks, and adoption of the DDEX AI disclosure standard for crediting AI use. Deezer is now removing AI-generated tracks that haven't been streamed in six months or that are involved in fraudulent streaming.

If you use AI in your own work — the rules, as they stand

The U.S. Copyright Office addressed this directly in Part 2 of its Copyright and Artificial Intelligence report, published January 29, 2025:

• Prompts alone are not enough. Copyright does not extend to "the mere provision of prompts."
• Human expression within an AI output is protectable — where a human author "determined sufficient expressive elements," including recognizable human-created work in the output or creative revisions to generated material.
• Using AI as a tool doesn't disqualify you. Including AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work "does not bar copyrightability."
• You must disclose and disclaim AI-generated content on your registration application.

The practical translation: a track where AI generated a stem or assisted an arrangement, but you wrote the melody and lyrics and made the creative production decisions, is registrable — you disclose the AI portions and disclaim them. A track generated wholly from a text prompt is not protectable, which means you cannot stop anyone from copying it. Not a moral judgment. A structural one.

Artist Spotlight  ·  Premiere Edition

Wardell Williams

He has been a musician, a songwriter, a minister, a producer and a man on dialysis. The through-line is a question he started asking when the answers ran out.

By Signal & Song  ·  Kansas City, Missouri  ·  Contemporary Gospel

Most origin stories in this business start with a demo, a deal, or a room full of the right people. This one starts with a question, and it is not the question you would expect a man in his circumstances to be asking.

Wardell Williams has had a long time to ask the other one. He has buried people he loved. He has lived with kidney disease and gone through dialysis. There were seasons, in his own words, when his future seemed uncertain — which is a careful way of saying what it means.

Anyone would have been forgiven for asking why me. He says he did, for a while.

Then he changed the question.

Instead of asking, “Why me?” I began asking, “How can my story help someone else?” Wardell Williams

Everything he has built since runs off that one substitution. It is worth sitting with, because it is a harder swap than it sounds. The first question wants an explanation. The second one does not wait for one.

The many hats, and what they taught him

Williams has worked as a musician, songwriter, minister, community advocate, producer, entrepreneur and servant — and he will tell you plainly that the list is not a boast. It is evidence for a conclusion he arrived at the long way round:

Talent alone is not enough.

Creative people need opportunity, guidance, and a system that turns an idea into something lasting. He watched gifted people — songwriters, authors, ministries, filmmakers, inventors — never reach the people their work was meant for. Not because the work was not good. Because nobody had told them what to do next, and they did not have the relationships to find out.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It is the reason this magazine exists.

What he built

That conviction became MBSGG Global Network and the Bloodstone Academy — a place, as he describes it, where creators can learn, develop, protect, produce, broadcast, distribute and preserve their work while keeping ownership of what they make.

Note the last clause. It is the one that separates a real offer from the ones we spend page 16 of this issue warning artists about.

The scope reaches past music. He talks about strengthening churches, encouraging nonprofits, backing entrepreneurs, preserving family legacies, and giving communities the tools to tell their own stories properly. Technology is changing the world, he says, but technology is not the answer.

People are.

The record

He has a release coming: “Passion in My Praise,” scheduled for 29 August 2026.

It opens quiet and ends as a declaration. Contemporary gospel with praise-and-worship bones and some Gospel R&B in the phrasing — the shape of a modern worship record carrying an older kind of testimony. The line the whole thing turns on is his:

“Praise isn’t something I do. It’s who I am.”

Wardell Williams, on “Passion in My Praise”

He means that structurally, not just lyrically. The song argues that praise is not a response to good circumstances — it is a posture that outlasts them in either direction. From a man who has been through what he has been through, that is not a slogan. It is a report.

What you are hearing, and what you are not

The lyrics are Wardell’s, written by him. The recording is a production demo generated with Suno, an AI music tool — his sketch of the arrangement, not a finished master. Live vocalists, musicians and choir are planned for the recordings that follow. He discloses this himself, unprompted, on his own release material.

We are printing it here in the same size type as everything else, because this magazine spends six pages telling independent artists to be exact about what they made, what a machine made, and which of those they actually own. The founder of the company that publishes it does not get an exception.

What his story is proof of

He puts it more plainly than we would: difficult seasons do not define our future. Faith, perseverance and purpose do.

That is the kind of sentence that can go soft in the wrong hands. It does not, here, because of who is saying it and what it cost him to be able to. A man who has been through dialysis and loss and came out the other side building a network for other people’s gifts has earned the right to that sentence without a caveat.

“If my journey inspires one person to believe that their gift still matters,” he says, “then every challenge has been worthwhile.”

And then, characteristically, he does not stop there.

“This is only the beginning.”

The Artist Section  ·  Feature

The Singer Who Was Scared to Sing

Kimberly Johnson built an AI singer named Nemah to carry a story she could not sing herself. The voice is AI. The story is hers.

By Signal & Song  ·  Kansas City, Missouri  ·  Gospel

Kimberly Johnson was scared to sing, so she built someone who could.

Nemah is an AI singer. Her first album, Mother Ruby’s Room, is a gospel story told in five songs, with narration between them. The Story Edition runs about 21 minutes. It is streaming free on MBSGGTV, and on the Second Row Sundays channel on YouTube.

Where Mother Ruby came from

Mother Ruby, the church mother at the center of the album, comes from two women in Johnson’s own life: her aunt and her Granna. Johnson wrote Mother Ruby’s story herself.

What the machine did, and what it didn’t

AI wrote the lyrics to four of the five songs. Johnson wrote the fifth, “Not Yet Is Not No.” What surprised her was what the four AI songs added up to.

I didn’t tell it to make a story. It just happened that way. Kimberly Johnson

Not yet is not no

Johnson wrote Chapter 3 in a hard season. “I was waiting on God to bring me peace when my world felt like it was falling apart,” she says.

The title is meant for other artists, too. “Not yet is not no, because independent artists struggle all the time, wondering when it will be their time.”

If you are in that season yourself, start with Chapter 3.

Who is Nemah?

Johnson does not hesitate. “She’s me,” she says. “Nemah’s story is my story.”

It is the same argument this network keeps making: AI is a tool, and what it carries is still human. That is the idea behind Made Real, which launches with MBSGGTV in February. A song can start with AI, and real musicians make it real.

Back of Book  ·  Resource

The Signal & Song Directory

Every organization, license, filing, and number named in this edition — in one place, so you never have to go find the page again.

For Artists — The Three Organizations

For Artists — Distribution, as published in August 2026

The math nobody runs: CD Baby's one-time fee wins for an artist with one release and modest streams. The annual subscriptions win for anyone prolific or earning meaningfully, because 9% forever eventually exceeds $25 a year. Work out where your catalog crosses that line.

Codes, Covers & Clearance

The Research Behind This Issue

Advertiser Directory  ·  Paid Listings

Businesses That Support Signal & Song

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Media Kit  ·  Premiere Edition

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