What a music site owes readers before it shows an ad

Google’s ads program is blunt about music sites that only embed. If the screen is someone else’s recording, the ad does not belong there. Wave already follows that line: no units on album pages, track permalinks, artist pages, radio, the videos theater, or the YouTube player. Units sit on pages we wrote — Home, How it works, About, Earnings, Install, Plans, and this newsroom.

That is not enough by itself. A thin site with six policy pages still looks like a wrapper. So we publish music news and essays here: how playback stays legal, how the wallet is capped, what a playlist is for. The ads on those pages fund the listener share. The ads are not the homepage.

Auto ads stay off

Page-level Auto ads would crawl into the player and the catalog. We place units ourselves. The AdSense snippet in the document head is there so Google can verify wavemusicapp.com. ads.txt lists the same publisher id. Reviewers should be able to click News, read an essay, and see a banner under writing — never on top of a VEVO embed.

Readers first, then the split

If you are here to listen, the player should work without a lecture. If you are here to review the site, the lecture should be findable: About, Earnings, and these posts. If you are here to get paid, the pool is half of the dashboard, not half of a local counter. That is what we owe readers before we show an ad. Everything else is decoration.