How to read a distributor royalty statement

67 · 2026-10-05 · 20 min read · Español

A distributor royalty statement is one line per store, per country, per track, per sale type and per period of use, and every line carries a quantity, an amount in the store’s currency, an exchange rate and the amount credited to you. Read it by column and sort it by the sales period, never by the date it was posted. The total at the bottom is the least informative number on the page: it is the sum of lines you have not read yet, before the four deductions the payout will take.

• A statement is a table. TuneCore’s downloadable monthly report carries twenty-one columns, from the sales period and the posted date through store, country, ISRC, UPC, sale type, units, per-unit price, net sales in the store’s currency and an exchange rate, to the total in US dollars. CD Baby shows the same line as a quantity, a unit and a payable. DistroKid names no columns and exports a CSV.
• Every line has two dates. The sales period is when the music was used; the posted date is when the store’s report reached your account. Stores report a whole month roughly two months later, on different weekends, and a sale in the last days of a month may carry into the next month’s report. Sort by the sales period.
• The sale type decides what is inside the number. TuneCore states that a United States download payment includes the mechanical royalty and that paying it to the song’s owner is your responsibility; a download outside the United States and an interactive stream anywhere are paid net of it, because the store or the service pays the mechanical to a society.
• A zero line is a play the store counted and did not pay for — a free trial, a fraction of a cent rounded, a stream ruled artificial or ineligible. A negative line is a reversal or a fee: an iTunes Complete My Album return, Spotify’s 30 per cent Discovery Mode commission, an artificial-streaming penalty. Each carries a label.
• Four things come off between the line and the bank: the distributor’s commission if its plan has one, United States withholding of up to 30 per cent for a non-US person who has not claimed a treaty, the payout method’s fee, and a currency conversion. Under the Canada–US tax treaty, copyright royalties for a musical work are taxable only in the country of residence.

What is each column on a distributor statement?

Each line names the store, country, recording, release, sale type and units, then the store’s amount, the exchange rate and your credit. The recording is named by ISRC and the release by UPC. Twenty-one columns on TuneCore’s file, three words on CD Baby’s page, a button on DistroKid’s. Same line.

TuneCore is the one distributor of the three that publishes its column list, so its names are the ones on the table below. Its help page, Finding and Understanding My Sales Reports, walks the downloadable monthly report column by column, and two of its glosses do real work. Optional ISRC is the code you supplied, and when you supplied one the TC Song ID beside it is TuneCore’s own and is to be disregarded; the same pair exists for the UPC. Net Sales is what the store paid “after keeping their percentage of a sale × # of units,” in the store’s currency, and Total Earned is that figure after the Exchange Rate beside it, in US dollars, because TuneCore pays in US dollars only.

CD Baby’s accounting page compresses the same line to three words — QTY is the number of streams, downloads or monetised playbacks, Unit is your takeaway per one of them, Payable is what you are owed after the partner’s cut and CD Baby’s — and shows the arithmetic: a QTY of 3 at a Unit of $0.637 is $1.911 payable. DistroKid publishes no column list at all. Its earnings page is a total, and under it a button labelled See Excruciating Detail; its export page says the CSV downloads directly under 50,000 records, is generated by filtered request above that, and stays available for seven days. Whichever of the three you use, one column joins the line to your catalogue and it is the ISRC. The UPC tells you which product sold, which is a different question, and if the statement is the first place you have ever seen the code, finding it elsewhere is its own piece. Twenty-one columns and one row per store, per country, per track, per sale type, per reporting day. It is the map the size of the empire, and you are being asked to fold it.

Which of the two dates do you sort by?

Sort by the sales period, the month the music was used. The posted date is the day the report landed in your account and says nothing about when anything was played.

The mechanics are in TuneCore’s page on when reports arrive, and they explain every odd thing the posted-date column does. Stores report an entire month’s sales on roughly a two-month delay, so a January sale is a March line. Stores have the whole month to send the report, and they use it: “Different stores post every weekend,” iTunes typically on the first weekend of the month and Spotify on the last. The distributor posts every weekend for whichever stores reported that week. A store with no activity on your release in a month sends no report for that month. And sales in the last few days of a month “may carry those sales over to the next month’s reporting statement.” Your January arrives in March, in instalments, on weekends, with the last day of January sometimes filed under February.

So a sales period is not complete when its first lines appear. It is complete when the slowest store has posted, and nothing on the page tells you which store that is this month. Group by posted date and March looks like a great month because January arrived in it. Group by sales period and each month fills in over several weekends until it stops moving, which is the only version of the number worth comparing to anything. How far behind the statement runs, and why a quiet line is not a missing line until the cadence says so, is the short-statement piece’s; this page only says which column to put the months in.

What does the sale type column tell you?

The sale type says whether a line is a download, a stream or video, which decides whether the mechanical royalty is inside the number. A monetised video view is the third kind. On a download the mechanical is either inside the number or was paid to a society, and the column is how you tell. The recording’s money is always on the line. The song’s money sometimes is, and that is the part nobody tells you.

TuneCore says it outright, on the page about whether it pays mechanicals to societies, in three cases. A download sold in the United States: the payment “is inclusive of both master and mechanical royalties,” and “it is your responsibility to allocate and pay out the mechanical royalties that you receive in your payment to whoever owns or controls the underlying musical composition(s).” A download sold outside the United States: the store may withhold the mechanical and pay it to a local society, so the money you receive “is generally exclusive of mechanical royalties.” An interactive stream, anywhere: exclusive, “because those services pay the mechanical royalties separately to the appropriate rights holders” — in the United States, to The MLC, which is where a writer goes to claim it, and that page already records that a download can run on a pass-through licence the label handles rather than the blanket. One column, three answers to the question of whether you are holding somebody else’s money. Read it before you spend a download line.

The value of a unit follows the same column. CD Baby’s page has the shape without the numbers: most download partners pay “a standard rate for each song sold,” and streams “vary from fractions of a penny to a few cents per play,” because a stream is a share of a pool and not a price — the pool is the short-statement piece’s subject and no rate appears here. Two store rules move lines between types. On iTunes, an album of ten tracks or fewer is priced as its tracks and reported as individual track sales, TuneCore’s report page says; eleven or more and it is an album. And since the July 2023 posting, TuneCore folds YouTube Content ID into the YouTube store line, adding three columns — Video ID, Commission Rate, Policy Type — that are blank for every other store, so a filled Video ID is how you tell a claim on somebody’s upload from a play on YouTube Music.

Then the exception to the rule the short-statement piece states, that a distributor statement carries recording royalties and nothing else. It holds exactly, unless you opted into something. A CD Baby account that added Boost carries SoundExchange lines — the rights-owner share, collected on your behalf at a 9 per cent commission, US plays only — and MLC lines at 15 per cent, on its own price list; the featured-artist share is still claimed by registering yourself. TuneCore’s publishing clients get those royalties “in a separate publishing statement.” If you never opted in, nothing of the song’s is on the page: the performance royalty on the same play is at your PRO, and the map of every stream says where the rest went. Each of those lines is labelled. A statement never hides what kind of money a line is; it only assumes you read the column.

What are the zero and negative lines?

A zero line is a play the store counted and did not pay for. A negative line is a reversal or a fee. Both carry a label that says which, in the sales-type or earning-type column, and the label is read before the amount.

The zeros first, each from a distributor’s own page. DistroKid’s: “Some streaming services may not pay earnings for listeners on free trials or promotions,” and a service that pools by country may pay a stream from a small market “less than a penny.” CD Baby’s: “In most cases, streams that show $0.00 actually do represent payments of a small fraction of a cent that has been rounded to $0.00,” and its Details link shows the decimal the page rounded away. Then the two labels that are not rounding. CD Baby’s guide to Spotify lines lists Artificial Streams — plays Spotify ruled were not a listener, shown at $0.00 for transparency and labelled separately since April 2024 — and Ineligible Streams: noise content under two minutes, and tracks under the floor the short-statement piece explains. A zero line is not a rounding error until the label says it is. Somebody on a free trial played the track, and the store wrote down that they did.

The negatives are three, and none of them is the distributor helping itself. The first is a return. On iTunes a listener who bought a track can later buy the rest of the album at an adjusted price, and TuneCore’s page on the negative iTunes line gives the accounting: the album is booked as a full album sale, “the previously purchased track is considered a return,” and the refund sits on the statement as a negative line until it is cancelled by the next sale of that same track, which “can persist over many months.” Its worked example is $0.70 on the track, then $7.00 on the album, then a $0.70 line with a minus sign waiting for another buyer of track eight. Somebody liked your record enough to come back for the rest of it, and the statement records it as a return.

The second is a commission you opted into. Spotify’s Discovery Mode page: “a 30% commission is applied to recording royalties generated from all streams of selected songs and their related track URIs in Discovery Mode contexts. All other streams remain commission-free.” TuneCore shows it as a negative Spotify figure in Net Sales; CD Baby shows it as a line of its own, Discovery Mode Marketing Fee. The third is a penalty. When Spotify rules that a track’s streams were artificial it charges the distributor a flat fee, and CD Baby’s guide says the fee is passed through to the account — “not a reversal of previously earned royalties,” a charge on top of the $0.00 the streams already earned. Three labels, three different things: money going back, money you agreed to give up, money somebody was fined. Read the label, then the sign, then the amount.

What comes off between the line and the payout?

Four things: the distributor’s commission if any, US withholding of up to 30 per cent absent a treaty claim, the payout fee, and currency conversion. The withholding applies to a non-US person paid from US sources, and the statement’s total is gross of all four. Three of the four are decided on a settings page you have never opened.

The commission is whatever the plan says, and each company says it. DistroKid: “DistroKid does not take any percentage of what stores send us for your earnings,” 100 per cent to your balance “minus banking fees/applicable taxes,” and 20 per cent only on the optional social-media monetisation pack. CD Baby: 9 per cent of download and streaming revenue, on the price list above. TuneCore charges a yearly plan or a per-release fee, and its report page defines Net Sales as what the store paid after the store’s own share; no commission of TuneCore’s appears in the columns. Check the plan you are on against the page, once, and then stop reading the total as if a percentage were hiding in it.

Withholding is the deduction nobody warned you about, and at its full rate it is the largest of the four. The IRS instructions for Form W-8BEN: “Foreign persons are subject to U.S. tax at a 30% rate on income they receive from U.S. sources that consists of … Royalties,” and the same form is where a resident of a treaty country claims “a reduced rate of, or exemption from, withholding.” The distributors apply it. DistroKid: outside the United States, “up to 30% of your earnings may be subject to tax withholding,” reduced or eliminated under a treaty, claimed in Section 3, Part II of the tax form at its payouts page. CD Baby: with no valid tax ID on file it withholds at the default rate, “24% for US persons and 30% for non-US persons.” TuneCore: backup withholding at “a standard rate of 24%” on a US payee with no W-9, on distribution earnings and not only publishing, and for the rest of the world, treaties “stipulate a lower rate of withholding, and in many cases a 0% withholding.” SoundExchange asks for the same W-8BEN before it pays a non-US payee. For a Canadian the treaty sentence is short. Article XII(3) of the Canada–US convention:

copyright royalties and other like payments in respect of the production or reproduction of any literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work (other than payments in respect of motion pictures and works on film, videotape or other means of reproduction for use in connection with television) … shall be taxable only in that other State.

That other State is the one you live in. On copyright royalties the treaty leaves Washington nothing, DistroKid’s own page sends a non-US artist to the rate table’s column labelled Copyrights, and the only thing between the zero and the 30 is Part II of a form on a settings page. Nothing on this site is tax advice, every one of the three distributors says the same on its own page, and an accountant is the person who says whether the treaty reaches your situation — but the treaty is public, the form is free, and thirty per cent of every US dollar is the most expensive form nobody fills in.

The last two are small and they are yours to set. DistroKid’s minimum withdrawal is $6, its fee page says, with a fee per method and “an FX fee of up to 3%” when the payment currency differs from the country selected; its two fee pages carry different figures for every method on the same date, so no per-method fee is quoted here. CD Baby pays weekly once your balance clears a Pay Point you choose, the method’s minimum — $1 for a US bank transfer, $3 for the SEPA class, $20 for a SWIFT wire — and the method’s fee, and for a bank outside the United States “funds are converted from USD to local currency,” so the deposit “may vary from week to week due to exchange rate fluctuations.” Set the Pay Point above the fee. Then the line, the total and the deposit are three different numbers on purpose, and you know which purpose.

How do you reconcile the statement against your catalogue?

Export the file, group the lines by ISRC and sales period, and check every group against your own register in both directions. Both directions means: every ISRC on the statement should be one you own, and every track you own should appear somewhere in the period. That is the whole method. The rest is where to click.

Get the spreadsheet: DistroKid’s detail view and its download button, TuneCore’s Download This Report from the filtered view or the monthly file itself, CD Baby’s report download. Pivot it with the ISRC down the side, the sales period across the top and the store as a second row level. Sort by the ISRC. The title will drift, the store will spell your name three ways, and the twelve characters are the one thing on the line that is damn well going to match.

Then read the pivot for four shapes. A code on the statement that is not in your register is either somebody else’s recording under your name or a second code for one of yours, and each is its own repair. A track of yours with no line in any store for a completed period is the short-statement piece’s check the stores, by name. A title on the line that is not your title against a code that is yours is the store’s spelling, and the code wins. A code that was never right because the release went out with the wrong one has an order of operations that starts before the statement.

Everything past that is somebody else’s page, and they are all next door. The six checks in their order are the short-statement piece’s; this is the spreadsheet they run on. The whole catalogue, every register, once a year, is the audit. And the day the login stops working, the piece on a distributor closing says which files to have already downloaded: every statement, not the recent ones. Download this one tonight. Sort it once. A statement you have sorted is a document; a statement you have only totalled is a rumour.

FAQ

Why is my statement in US dollars when I am not in the United States?

Because the distributor pays in one currency and converts on the way: TuneCore’s report carries the store’s currency, an exchange rate and a total in US dollars, and says it pays in US dollars only; CD Baby converts from US dollars to your local currency at each weekly payout; DistroKid charges a currency fee of up to 3 per cent when the payment currency differs from the country you selected.

Why do album sales show up as track sales?

On iTunes an album of ten tracks or fewer is priced as the sum of its tracks and reported as individual track sales, so the statement shows songs where a listener bought an album; an album of eleven tracks or more is priced and reported as an album. TuneCore’s sales-report page states the rule.

Do I owe a songwriter anything out of a statement?

On a United States download line, yes: TuneCore states the payment includes the mechanical royalty and that paying it to whoever owns the song is your responsibility; on an interactive stream, no, because the service pays the mechanical separately, to The MLC in the United States. If the writer is you, the money is claimed by registering the song there.

Why is there a country on my statement I never released in?

The country column records the territory of the store where the sale or stream occurred, so a listener in any country your release is available in produces a line rather than an error. Whether that play also earned the song something in that country is a question for the map of every royalty stream.

Sources

• TuneCore Help, Finding and Understanding My Sales Reports (updated 2026-09-19) — the twenty-one columns of the monthly report, by name and gloss; the CSV download; the iTunes rule for albums of ten tracks or fewer; Content ID folded into the YouTube line from the July 2023 posting with Video ID, Commission Rate and Policy Type columns; a negative Spotify figure as Discovery Mode commission; payment in US dollars only.
• TuneCore Help, When Will I Receive My Music Sales Reports? (updated 2026-09-17) — the two-month delay, stores posting on different weekends, no report for a month with no activity, and end-of-month sales carried into the next report.
• TuneCore Help, Why do I see a negative sale for iTunes on my Monthly Sales Report? (updated 2026-07-22) — Complete My Album booked as an album sale and a track return; the $0.70 and $7.00 example; the refund persisting until the next sale of that track.
• TuneCore Help, Does TuneCore automatically pay out mechanical royalties to rights/collection societies? (updated 2026-09-14) — a US download payment inclusive of the mechanical and the payee’s responsibility to pay it on; downloads outside the US and interactive streams exclusive of it; the separate publishing statement.
• TuneCore Help, Tunecore & Taxes (updated 2026-09-16) — backup withholding at 24 per cent without a W-9, on distribution earnings; treaties reducing withholding to 0 in many cases; withheld amounts reclaimable as a credit.
• CD Baby Help Center, Understanding your sales, accounting and payments (updated 2026-06-16) — QTY, Unit and Payable and the 3 × $0.637 example; a standard rate per download and streams at fractions of a cent; $0.00 as rounding and the Details link; Artificial Streams and the penalty fee.
• CD Baby Help Center, Understanding Spotify Sales Reports (updated 2026-06-16) — the Spotify earning types: Stream, Discovery Mode Marketing Fee, Artificial Streams labelled since April 2024, Ineligible Streams, Ad Studio, Sync Marketing, and the Artificial Streaming Fee as a flat charge that is not a reversal.
• CD Baby Help Center, How do I get paid from CD Baby? (updated 2026-09-19) — default withholding of 24 per cent for US persons and 30 for non-US persons without a valid tax ID; the Pay Point; per-method minimums and fees; weekly payouts and the USD-to-local conversion.
• CD Baby Help Center, How much does CD Baby cost? (updated 2026-09-01) — 9 per cent of download and streaming revenue and of SoundExchange royalties; 15 per cent of MLC revenue.
• CD Baby Help Center, Can I collect SoundExchange royalties through CD Baby? (updated 2026-09-15) — Boost collecting the rights-owner share at a 9 per cent cut, US plays only; the featured share claimed directly.
• CD Baby Help Center, How do I download my sales reports? (updated 2026-06-16) — the report download under Sales & Reports; a missing report means no completed sales or payments in that period.
• TuneCore Help, How much does TuneCore cost? (updated 2026-09-20) — the yearly Unlimited plans and the pay-per-release fee; no commission is named.
• DistroKid Help Center, How Much of My Earnings Does DistroKid Keep? (updated 2026-09-02) — no percentage of store earnings; 100 per cent minus banking fees and applicable taxes; 20 per cent on the optional social-media pack only.
• DistroKid Help Center, Why Do Some Streams in My Earnings Report Show Earnings of Zero? (updated 2025-12-20) — free trials and promotions; country pools paying less than a penny.
• DistroKid Help Center, Tax Withholding for Non-U.S. Residents (updated 2026-01-26) — up to 30 per cent withheld; reduced or eliminated by treaty; where the treaty claim is entered.
• DistroKid Help Center, Is There a Fee When I Withdraw My Earnings? (updated 2026-06-29) — the $6 minimum withdrawal and the FX fee of up to 3 per cent. Its per-method fees differ from the ones on DistroKid’s threshold page of the same date, and neither set is quoted here.
• DistroKid Help Center, Saving Your Earnings Information as a Spreadsheet File (updated 2025-11-09) — the detail view, direct download under 50,000 records, filtered generation above, and seven days’ availability.
• Spotify for Artists, Using Discovery Mode in Spotify for Artists — the 30 per cent commission on recording royalties from streams in Discovery Mode contexts; all other streams commission-free.
• Internal Revenue Service, Instructions for Form W-8BEN (Rev. October 2021) — the 30 per cent rate on US-source royalties paid to foreign persons, and the treaty claim.
• Department of Finance Canada, Convention Between Canada and the United States of America With Respect to Taxes on Income and on Capital, consolidated to the 1997 protocol — Article XII(3), copyright royalties for a musical work taxable only in the residence state. The 2007 protocol amends Article XII at paragraphs 5, 6 and 8 and leaves paragraph 3 as quoted.

Every page cited here was read on the date at the top of this piece. The three distributors’ help centres refuse automated readers, so each article was read through the help centre’s own article API, and the dates beside them are the pages’ own last-updated stamps. Column names, thresholds, fees and rates are each company’s at that date and change without notice; the linked pages are the living documents. Nothing here is tax advice: the treaty and the IRS instructions are quoted in their own words, the distributors’ withholding pages in theirs, and whether a treaty reaches your situation is a question for an accountant, which is what each of the three distributors also says.

Keeping the register

Every check on this page compares the statement to a list you already hold, and the list is the thing that goes stale. CatalogTracker keeps it: every release with its UPC and every track with its ISRC, searchable by the code so a line from the statement finds its recording in one lookup, and exportable to CSV or JSON so the pivot has a second sheet to match against. It holds no royalty amounts, no earnings and no statements — nothing in it models money, and this page does not pretend otherwise. It holds the register the statement is checked against, which is the half of the comparison the store cannot supply. In development for iPhone.