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. A pastor who has preached the same anointed word for twenty years to a sanctuary that keeps getting emptier. An artist with a song that would wreck you, sitting on a hard drive because nobody told her what to do next.

Neither of them has a talent problem. They have 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 28 — we correct it and show our work.

The number one reason forty million Americans stopped attending church was not theology. It was that they moved. Davis & Graham, The Great Dechurching

Read that again. They moved. And when they got to the new town and reached for their phone to find a church, more than a few of them found nothing. Not a broken theology — a broken listing. Fifty-one percent of them say they would come back.

That is not a crisis. That is an assignment.

Artists, your assignment is on the other side of this book. 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  ·  Two audiences, one problem: being findable.

The Signal  ·  Front of Book

Eleven Numbers That Reset the Room

The year's most consequential findings for anyone trying to reach people through a screen — with the receipts, and with the ones we're not printing and why.

The Church Section  ·  Feature

They Didn't Leave Over Doctrine. They Moved.

The largest religious shift in American history was driven by U-Haul trucks, work schedules, and second marriages — not by arguments about the faith. Which means the fix is not a better apologetic. It's a better address.

Signal & Song Staff  ·  Church Growth

If you have sat in a leadership meeting in the last five years, you have heard someone explain the empty seats. The culture. The politics. The phones. The kids today. Every one of those explanations has the same comfortable feature: it locates the problem outside the building.

The largest study ever conducted on why Americans stopped attending church says something less comfortable and far more useful.

Researchers Jim Davis and Michael Graham, working with political scientist Ryan Burge, surveyed roughly 7,000 people across three escalating phases to understand what they named the Great Dechurching: about 40 million Americans who stopped attending in the last twenty-five years. It is the largest and fastest religious shift in the nation's history — bigger than the First and Second Great Awakenings combined, in the other direction.

Then they asked why.

The top three reasons

Not doctrine. Not scandal. Not the sermon.

1. "I moved."
2. "Attendance became inconvenient."
3. A change in family structure — marriage, divorce, remarriage, a new baby, a new schedule.

Only 12% cited political disagreement with their clergy or congregation as a significant factor. The overwhelming majority — roughly 30 million of the 40 million — are what the researchers call casual dechurchers: people who drifted, without a fight, without a wound, without ever making a decision to leave.

Nobody stormed out. They just never found the next one.

They did not reject the church. They relocated, and the church did not follow them into the search bar.

Now the part that should get you out of your chair

51% of the dechurched say they are willing to return. Sixty-two percent still believe Jesus is the only way to God. These are not deconstructed skeptics who need to be re-argued into faith. These are people with an intact belief system and no current address.

Continued from page 7

So What Actually Happens When Somebody Moves to Your Town?

Picture her. She is 34. She grew up in church, she still believes, and she just took a job four states away. On her second Saturday in the new city she picks up her phone and types four words into it.

"church near me"

What she finds in the next ninety seconds determines whether your church ever meets her. And here is what the research says she is looking for, in order: service times, then activities and events, then directions, then what your services look and sound like. Not your doctrinal statement. Not your history. Times, location, and what to expect.

That ranking comes from Grey Matter Research's church-website study — and we will be honest with you, that fieldwork is from 2012, so treat the specific percentages as historical. But the order has been corroborated by everything since, and it matches how any human being evaluates any unfamiliar place they are considering walking into alone.

The findability audit nobody runs

Grey Matter also did something almost nobody has repeated: they audited nearly 8,000 individual church listings across 123 Protestant denominations to see whether a person could actually find a local church through official channels. The success rate was 32%. One in five links was broken or wrong. Half of the listings in denominations that did offer web links had no link at all — including for churches that had a perfectly good website.

That study is from 2015. If your reaction is "surely that's better now," we would gently suggest you go check your own listing before you assume so. It takes four minutes.

What to do Monday

• Search your own church the way a stranger would. Open a private browsing window and search "church near me" plus your town. Note where you appear, and what shows.
• Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. Hours, address, phone, photos of actual people, and a link that works. BrightLocal's 2025 small-business survey found only 35% of small and medium businesses have a Google Business Profile at all — a cheap, wide-open gap.
• Put service times above the fold on your homepage. Not in a PDF. Not on a third-level page. In the first screen, in a font your grandmother can read on a phone.
• Build a "Plan Your Visit" page. Where to park. Which door. What people wear. What happens to your kids. How long it lasts. Every one of those is a reason someone talked themselves out of coming.
• Ask an AI assistant about your town's churches. Then fix whatever it got wrong about you.
• Fix your denominational listing. Call whoever maintains it and confirm your web link is present and correct.
• Apply for the Google Ad Grant. Eligible 501(c)(3) organizations can receive up to $10,000 per month in free Google Ads. Most churches have never heard of it.

A church that is easy to find and easy to re-enter is not doing marketing. It is removing the exact obstacle that 40 million people tripped over.

The theology of this is not complicated. The parable of the lost sheep is not about the ninety-nine reorganizing the pen. It is about going out to where the one actually is. In 2026, where the one actually is — at the moment she is looking for you — is a search box.

The Church Section  ·  Feature

Your Livestream Is Not Cannibalizing Your Sanctuary.

Somebody on your board is convinced that if you stream it, they'll stay home. Twenty-four thousand churchgoers were asked. Here is what they said.

Signal & Song Staff  ·  Broadcast & Streaming

It is the single most common objection in American church leadership right now, and it always arrives in the same tone of reluctant wisdom: "I just think if we make it too easy to watch from the couch, people will watch from the couch."

It sounds like stewardship. It is, unfortunately, wrong — and we can now say that with a sample size instead of a shrug.

The Hartford Institute for Religion Research's EPIC Attender Survey asked more than 24,000 churchgoers across the United States about their actual worship habits. Its headline finding is stated plainly enough that we will quote it directly:

Offering a live stream does not reduce in-person attendance, nor does it erode the importance of belonging to a faith community. Hartford Institute for Religion Research, EPIC Attender Survey

What the 24,000 actually do

Eighty-five percent of the people surveyed belong to congregations that offer online worship. Of those:

• 26% regularly engage with worship online.
• 19% alternate — some Sundays in the room, some Sundays on a screen.
• 4% attend online exclusively. And this group shows lower engagement and lower giving, which is precisely what you would expect from people who were already at the edge.

Four percent. That is the entire population your board is worried about — and the evidence suggests they were never the ones filling your third row.

Meanwhile 87% of online attendees report being satisfied with the experience, and 46% of them connect with more than one congregation. Read that last one carefully, because it cuts both ways: your people are sampling other churches, and other churches' people are sampling you.

Continued from page 10

Then Where, Exactly, Should You Stream It?

Churches burn an enormous amount of volunteer energy debating platforms. The debate is usually conducted on vibes. It does not have to be — Pew Research Center publishes exactly the number you need, from a nationally representative sample of 5,022 U.S. adults.

That chart settles more arguments than any opinion in this magazine could. YouTube and Facebook are the only two platforms that reach a majority of American adults. For a church trying to reach its literal geographic neighbors — not a national audience, not a brand following — those two are the evidence-based core. Instagram is where your under-40s are. TikTok is a discovery layer, not a foundation.

The tradeoffs nobody puts in the brochure

Cover Story  ·  The Church Section

The Exemption Ends Where the Camera Begins.

Your worship team can legally play that song for the people in the room. The moment you point a camera at them and press "Go Live," a different body of law takes over — and most churches have never been told.

Signal & Song Staff  ·  Copyright & Licensing

There is a sentence buried in U.S. copyright law that every church in America relies on without knowing it exists, and a second sentence right beside it that almost none of them have read.

The first is 17 U.S.C. § 110(3), the Religious Service Exemption. It exempts the "performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work or of a dramatico-musical work of a religious nature, or display of a work, in the course of services at a place of worship or other religious assembly." In plain terms: your band can play it, your congregation can sing it, and you owe nobody a license for that.

The second is in the congressional revision notes that accompany the statute. It is one sentence, and it is the most important sentence in this magazine:

…the exemption would not extend to religious broadcasts or other transmissions to the public at large, even where the transmissions were sent from the place of worship. Congressional revision notes, 17 U.S.C. § 110

Same song. Same team. Same sanctuary. Same Sunday morning. Exempt for the people in the room. Unlicensed for the people watching at home.

Nobody wrote this rule to trap churches. It was written in an era when "transmission" meant a radio tower and a budget. Then a pandemic put a camera in every sanctuary in the country, and roughly 86% of American churches walked across a legal line they did not know was there.

Three things the exemption does not cover, which will surprise you

1. Reproduction. Typing lyrics into your presentation software or printing them in the bulletin is not a performance and not a display — it is copying. Different right, different license.
2. Recording. Capturing the service to a file is reproduction too. Christian Copyright Solutions puts it flatly: "Recording or 'reproducing' music is not a performance or display."
3. Anything outside the service. Vacation Bible School. The youth lock-in. The fundraiser concert. The fall festival. Music in the café or the gym or on hold when someone calls the office. None of it is "in the course of services," so none of it is exempt.

What it costs to be wrong

Statutory damages under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c) run from $750 to $30,000 per work infringed. Willful infringement goes up to $150,000 per work. Innocent infringement — where the infringer "was not aware and had no reason to believe" — can be reduced to no less than $200, at a court's discretion.

And here is a detail worth knowing: § 504(c)(2) contains a mandatory remission of statutory damages for good-faith fair-use errors by employees of nonprofit educational institutions, libraries, archives, and public broadcasting entities. Churches and religious organizations are not on that list. Being a nonprofit is not a safe harbor here.

None of which is to frighten you. Practically speaking, catastrophic judgments against small churches are rare; what is common is muted audio, blocked video, a dead stream on Easter morning, and a channel with strikes on it. Turn the page for the fix — which is genuinely cheap and takes one afternoon.

Cover Story  ·  Pull This Page Out

The Church Licensing Decision Matrix

Find what you are actually doing in the left column. The right column is the license that covers it. Print this and put it on the wall of the media booth.

The two systems, side by side

Cover Story  ·  Continued

Being Licensed and Being Un-Flagged Are Two Different Problems.

Here is the fact that no licensor puts in its marketing, and that every church media director learns the hard way at some point:

YouTube's Content ID system does not recognize your CCLI license. Neither does Facebook's.

These are automated matching systems. They scan every upload and every live stream continuously against a fingerprint database, and they make no distinction whatsoever between authorized and unauthorized use. Your license is an agreement between you and a licensing body. Content ID is a robot that has never heard of it.

So you can be completely legally correct and still get muted on Easter morning.

Claims are not strikes — know the difference

This distinction matters enormously and almost nobody explains it:

• A Content ID claim is the normal outcome. The copyright holder is identified as a match, and typically monetizes your video with ads. Your stream keeps running. Your channel is fine.
• A strike is the serious outcome, and it generally happens when you dispute a claim and lose the dispute. Multiple strikes can suspend or delete your channel entirely — three or more can terminate an account.

The practical consequence: an unexamined dispute-everything policy is riskier than living with claims. Churches that handle this well keep a pre-written dispute template citing their streaming license, file it deliberately, and accept that some copyright holders will monetize anyway.

During a live broadcast, a match may produce a placeholder image over your stream, a warning, or an outright interruption. If your Sunday depends on the stream, build a plan for the moment it goes dark — a backup platform link and someone whose only job is to post it.

The part that is about integrity, not law

Christian Copyright Solutions raises a point that has nothing to do with liability and is, we would argue, the better reason to get this right. On most social platforms, churches cannot report song usage. Which means the songwriter whose worship song moved your congregation to tears on Sunday receives nothing for the ten thousand people who heard it on your Facebook page.

Somewhere there is a worship writer with a day job, whose song your church has sung forty times this year. Reporting your usage is how she gets paid. That is not compliance. That is honoring the laborer.

And if you want the other half of that story — how a songwriter actually gets paid when churches sing their song, and why most independent worship writers have no idea the mechanism exists — it is on page 23.

Your one-afternoon compliance checklist

• Confirm which CCLI licenses you actually hold. Log in. Many churches hold the Church Copyright License and assume streaming is included. It is not.
• Add streaming coverage. CCLI Streaming, Streaming Plus if you use tracks, or CCS WORSHIPcast if secular music touches your stream.
• Report your song usage. Every service. It takes minutes, it is a license requirement, and it is how writers get paid.
• Audit your non-service music. Café, gym, lobby, hold music, youth events, the fall festival. None of it is exempt.
• Write the dispute template now, before you need it at 9:40 on a Sunday morning.
• Check your Bible translation's streaming permissions. Publisher by publisher.
• Ask CVLI directly about streaming film clips rather than assuming your video license travels online. It generally does not.
• Have an attorney review the whole stack once. One hour of counsel is cheaper than one claim.

Center Spread  ·  The Church Section

Rented Land vs. Owned Land

Social media is not your audience. It is a place where your audience is currently standing, at the pleasure of a company that owes you nothing. Here is the difference between reach you borrow and reach you keep.

Center Spread  ·  The Playbook

The Four-Hour Church Content Plan

Built for the church whose "media team" is one volunteer with a phone and a Tuesday evening. Do not add platforms. Add consistency.

Match your platforms to your actual capacity

Tiering adapted from practitioner guidance published by church communications consultancies. Presented as professional advice, not research findings — see the note at the foot of this page.

The content mix

The seven mistakes we see most

1. Using the feed as a bulletin board. Announcement dumps with no image and no human being in them.
2. Posting children's faces without written parental consent. This is a safeguarding and legal exposure, not a style question. Get the release.
3. Arguing with commenters in public. Nobody has ever won one of these.
4. Sharing something unverified. Your credibility is the whole asset.
5. Using photos you don't have rights to. The same copyright logic from page 13 applies to images.
6. Starting a fifth platform before the first four are consistent.
7. Abandoning an account mid-stream. A page whose last post is fourteen months old actively tells a visitor you closed.

The website page nobody builds, and everybody needs

• Service times, first screen, large type. The single most-sought item on any church website.
• Address with a working map link. And which door to use.
• "Plan Your Visit." Parking, dress, childcare, length, what happens when you walk in.
• One recent sermon, playable without an account.
• Photos of your actual congregation. Not stock photography. People can tell, instantly.
• A giving link and a contact a human answers.
• A claimed Google Business Profile with current hours, photos, and responses to reviews.
• Mobile-first, always. Look at it on a phone before you look at it on a desktop.

Church Spotlight  ·  Premiere Edition

Believers of Glory in Jesus Christ Church

Eight people on a good Sunday. Thirty churches at the walk. What a congregation this small learned about getting other churches to move.

By Signal & Song  ·  Belton, Missouri

Once a month a few people from a church that seats eight on a good Sunday load up and drive to somebody else’s sanctuary. They set up at the front. By the time they leave, that congregation has a mental health ministry of its own. Peculiar. Raytown. North Kansas City, then south. At the end of the year, thirty churches walk together.

Believers of Glory in Jesus Christ Church has been in Belton, Missouri since 2017. Six to eight people attend in a given week. It has no paid staff and its pastor is not on payroll. On paper it is the smallest church we looked at for this edition. In practice it has put a mental health ministry into more sanctuaries than congregations a hundred times its size.

What they did

The decision that made it possible came first, and it cost Pastor Damon Brewington something. He was a Baptist preacher. He planted Believers of Glory as a non‑denominational church deliberately — so that he could network across denominations rather than within one. That is not a small thing to give up, and it is the reason everything else works. A ministry that belongs to no denomination can walk into any of them.

The ministry is called “Let’s Put A Face to Mental Illness,” and it is directed by Minister Beverly Brewington. Once a month it travels to another church and helps that congregation stand up its own mental health ministry inside its own sanctuary — not a referral, not a pamphlet, a ministry that stays after they leave. The church runs it alongside work with The Sending Project, the Justice & Dignity Center, Trauma Healing, the Cass County Ministerial Alliance and the American Bible Society. Its youth ministry meets Saturdays — Bible study, then basketball, two o’clock to half past three.

Let the church say amen. Pastor Damon Brewington

What it cost them

Nothing, if you ask what they charge. The monthly mental health meetings are free. There is no paid staff. The pastor takes no salary. The volunteers are people who wanted to do it.

The real number is the gym. Youth basketball costs forty dollars every Saturday in court time. Held every week, that is more than two thousand dollars a year, paid by a congregation of six to eight. “God has not failed us yet since 2017,” Brewington says. He also notes, without being asked, that a church this size has been able to give to ministries larger than its own.

What happened next

Brewington reports that people who came in with suicidal thoughts came out the other side, that members carrying grief, depression and loss found help, and that panel discussions were set up specifically for younger people. Parents of adult children, he says, found ways to cope that they did not have before. These are his accounts of his own ministry rather than clinical outcomes we can verify, and we are printing them as such.

What can be counted: the church’s media page averages 200 to 400 viewers a week, roughly forty times the number of people in the room. The annual mental health walk now involves thirty churches. The congregation is still six to eight people.

Asked about the size, Brewington points at the arithmetic of the thing — Jesus worked with twelve.

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 21

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 24

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 26 — 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 30 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.”

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 Churches — Licensing

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

These businesses paid to be on this page. The resource directory on the previous page is editorial — nobody can buy their way onto it. We keep the two separate so you always know which is which.

Media Kit  ·  Premiere Edition

Advertise in Signal & Song

A magazine read by the two audiences most businesses in this space are trying to reach — church decision-makers and independent artists — and read on purpose, because it answers questions they cannot get answered anywhere else.

Rate Card — Premiere Edition Founding Rates

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What we will and will not run

We accept advertising from businesses, ministries, artists, and services that serve our readers honestly. We decline advertising for pay-for-placement playlist services, guaranteed-stream services, "we'll make you famous" development schemes, and anything requiring an artist to pay an upfront fee to be considered for a placement or a deal.

We wrote a whole page about those on page 30. It would be strange to take their money on page 31.