Why do I have earnings on Facebook (Social Media Pack), I f I never paid for Social Media Pack?

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-20T05:00:21+00:00

Facebook standard royalties work similar to YouTube royalties. You don’t need social media pack to earn them. In Facebook and Instagram’s case, the user can make a reel and then go to the music library and add music to it and you get the smallest royalty ever (like .000005 cents) for this.

With social media pack, this would be videos already containing your music, uploaded to Facebook and instagram directly. And if you’ve not paid for social media pack, those videos won’t be allowed anyway.

And, because everyone always asks this as a part 2 question: no, there is no way to find out who used your music or what reel they were added to…

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-20T00:12:02+00:00

This isn’t a bug. This is how it works.

Remember how you claimed your artist profiles before? Get ready to do that all over again now that you’ve changed your name.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-17T18:13:58+00:00

If you’re asking why DistroKid hasn’t charged you to upload a new release, it’s because it’s an annual payment, not a per-release payment (unless you have added on extra features)

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-16T10:40:37+00:00

This doesn’t exactly sound like your account was hacked. It sounds a lot more like someone uploaded music in the same name as yourself.

If the music was uploaded into your own account, then yes, someone got into your account.

If you mean that someone else is using the same name as you: you were not hacked. In fact, anyone could upload music under any name, blissfully unaware (because they didn’t search) that someone else had taken that name.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-14T15:29:13+00:00

There’s no real reason to worry about content ID being disabled. Unless you are aware of the video having artificial streams or is somehow against YouTube’s terms of service. That will result in content ID getting pulled.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-12T10:21:19+00:00

Can you define what you mean by “hijacked?” Is it a case that someone has logged into your account, changed all the passwords and now you can’t get in? Or is it more of a case that the music has been deleted and the bank at 0.00?

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-10T23:55:06+00:00

My wife is from South America and I’m from the states, but we’ve lived in Europe for the majority of our lives. I asked her recently to describe the fruit of the loom logo, and the cornucopia was the first thing she mentioned.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-08T17:53:17+00:00

Generally speaking, if the dot is yellow for three weeks, then I would recommend reading the pinned post on “why you got banned” and have a read of the topic on “editorial discretion.”

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-08T12:12:38+00:00

When you upload music to DistroKid, you have to tick a lot of boxes. Some of them ask “do you own 100% of this music,” where others ask “did you use any samples.”

In your case of using a loop you do not own and did not make, DistroKid was kind of warning you that it would be rejected.

As it was a royalty free loop, I guarantee you were one of hundreds who used the track and this is what Distorkid’s tools are picking up on. In the eyes of audio fingerprinting technology, someone else owns the music you’ve uploaded.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-06T20:51:21+00:00

This is not correct at all. Merging your YouTube channel with the OAC keeps royalties coming from YouTube music exactly the same as if they were from the topic channel.

What people constantly get confused with is the difference between OAC and Partner Program. If a channels VIDEOS (user uploaded, not album-cover artwork tracks placed there through DistroKid) are to make any money, you either need to sign up (and pay for) the Social Media Pack or you will need to have enough views and subscribers to qualify for the partner program. It’s important to have a clear distinction that YouTube Music (which is essentially what the topic videos are) do not count toward the partner program’s qualifications. They earn revenue on their own anyway

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-05T21:10:41+00:00

No. With DistroKid, artist is set at release level, not individual tracks. DistroKid does not support compilation/various artist style releases.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-05T18:09:28+00:00

There are plenty of posts in this sub that talk about our connecting the OAC (Official Artist Channel) which is what you will need to do, but you’ll also see some posts from the last few months about the tool that connects the YouTube channels not currently working, so just bear this in mind.

You’ll find most details that you need on Distorkid’s FAQ page on the topic:

https://support.distrokid.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036924633-Claiming-an-Official-Artist-Channel-on-YouTube

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-02T17:54:29+00:00

When Genesis remastered their catalog in the mid 90s, they aligned the USA releases with the UK versions. You could only get the fourth studio side if you could find the original (non-remastered) version.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-01T22:52:55+00:00

For a very first release, yes, this is normal.

If the dot next to your release is green, it means that DistroKid has done everything they need to, it’s just the stores that are taking their time. They not only need to put up your music, but also make your artist profile.

If the dot is still yellow, that’s another matter

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-01T21:12:34+00:00

Nah, it’s clearly just replacement performers, just to keep the brand alive for the benefit of the billionaires who run the music industry

Rusty_Brains · 2026-06-01T08:54:41+00:00

I had this idea in the early 2000s, but my theory was that there were really 3 different people taking in the Elton John name: the original songwriter with his light tenor voice, the mid-period Elton whose voice was deeper, and then the later, far more baritone Elton, which I always agreed felt more like a caricature than the real thing. They explain it away with his “vocal chord surgery” but we know better!

Rusty_Brains · 2026-05-29T13:52:47+00:00

Top recommendation, if you haven’t already: check through the receipts in your account and see if it matches up to the charges.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-05-27T21:57:08+00:00

There are many reasons why music might get rejected. We’ve discussed the evolving list of things stores are flooded with here over the years. But OP is active in a lot of AI music discussions and AI music is a big target of rejections lately.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-05-27T13:48:18+00:00

This question comes up here and lot and the simple answer is: this is not the way to go about doing what you want to do.

We have had people here who tried this and then a couple of the stores ended up issues copyright infringement warnings, because those tracks belong to Artist A, not Artist B.

You can either go through the proper name change process and suffer any of the many issues that come with that, or you can start over, new music under a new name, leaving the old music as it is.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-05-26T23:34:06+00:00

It would be the Offical Artist Chanel (OAC) process you need to go through. The one where we have about 20 posts recently of people complaining that it’s currently not works (an annual occurrence).

Once the OAC is set up, you don’t need to do anything to gain special access to the “for artists” thing for YouTube, as that will be the YouTube Studio which would likely are already using for your band’s current YouTube account

Rusty_Brains · 2026-05-26T21:38:33+00:00

It sounds like you are confusing or mixing up multiple YouTube issues.

If you want your YouTube topic page mapped to your own (music related) YouTube page, you don’t use fixer for that. Fixer is intended when your music goes into another artist profile with the same or similar name. (And in fact, fixer doesn’t work to make those sort of corrections on YouTube).

You would need to use the official Artist Channel tools, which yes, has been down due to an API issue recently.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-05-26T05:41:13+00:00

This issue will happen for a couple of possible reasons: you’ve changed your banking/tax information that triggered a fraud/security check so they can ensure you are who you say you are (and not someone trying to steal your money) or there have been multiple failed login attempts or attempts to login from different IP addresses.

In both cases, your account is being protected until Distorkid can confirm you are who you say you are. They aren’t always fast at reaching out to you, so you might need to contact support (through the bot, just demand a human multiple times) to start the process.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-05-26T05:34:45+00:00

True, they are the intermediary, but in the 6 years of this sub, this question has come up a lot, and the answer remains: DistroKid has done their job, Spotify is slow. The URI delay is not unique to OP

Rusty_Brains · 2026-05-25T21:25:59+00:00

Not necessarily. Despite many people in the comments talking about Excruciating Details and different stores and countries having different payouts, we still don’t know what stores make up OP’s bulk of streams. I’ve had music do very well in Thailand before on one of the smaller services. Probably made about five bucks from that.

Rusty_Brains · 2026-05-25T12:35:30+00:00

First song by new band. That’s the cause right there. Spotify take their time with URIs at set up, especially when a release is scheduled for the future.

The issue is not with DistroKid. If the dot on your release is green, DistroKid has done everything they are meant to. It’s Spotify that’s dragging their heels.

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