MethodUpdated 22 September 2026

Reading a distributor report

Thousands of rows, cryptic column names, a total to match: here is how to read your distributor's sales report, and what to check before you turn it into your artists' statements.

Column names change from one distributor to another, and sometimes from one year to the next: this guide describes what you usually find, not any particular format.

A hand going over a printed table in front of a laptop.

The report

What your distributor sends you

Your distributor places your music on streaming and download platforms, collects what your tracks earn, keeps its share and pays you the rest. With that payment comes a sales report: a line-by-line account of what each track earned.

It arrives every month, or less often depending on your distribution contract. It usually has one line per track, per platform, per country and per month: even for a small catalogue, that quickly adds up to thousands of lines.

It is the raw material of your royalty statements. Every euro paid to an artist should be traceable to these lines: in France, if the artist asks, you must give the accountant they appoint whatever proves your accounts are accurate.

The file

CSV, Excel, ZIP: the formats

Depending on the distributor, the report comes as a CSV, a TSV, an Excel file, or compressed in a ZIP archive, sometimes with other documents such as a PDF summary. A CSV is plain text: one line per sale, columns separated by commas or semicolons. A TSV is the same with tabs.

The same content can be written in several ways: a comma or a point for decimals, dates as day/month or month/day, a few lines of heading before the table itself. None of that is a problem, as long as you know before you read the figures.

One piece of advice: always keep the file exactly as the distributor sent it. Opening a CSV in a spreadsheet and saving it can damage it without warning: leading zeros vanish from codes, long numbers turn into scientific notation, and a barcode becomes useless.

Always keep the original
Check the decimal separator
Never re-save the original CSV

A blue file box full of folders on a wooden table.

One line

What a line carries

Column names vary, but a line usually answers four questions: where, when, what and how much.

Where

The platform or shop that sold or streamed the track, and the country of the sale, sometimes as a two-letter code (FR for France).

When

Two dates not to mix up: the month of the sale or stream, and the month of the report that declares it. Sales arrive with a delay: a stream in March may only appear in a May report.

What

The track and the release, with their codes. The ISRC identifies a recording; the UPC, or EAN, identifies a whole release (a single, an EP, an album). These codes are safer than titles, which get written in several ways.

How much

A quantity (streams, downloads, records sold) and amounts: depending on the report, a gross amount, the distributor's fee and a net amount, each in its currency.

Amounts

Gross, net, currency: which amount counts

The gross amount is what the platform paid for your tracks. The distributor takes its fee out of it, and sometimes other charges; what is left is the net amount, the one you receive.

For royalties, the artist's contract says which base their rate applies to. The simplest case is net receipts, meaning the report's net amount. So check which column you take: a rate applied to gross instead of net throws off the whole statement.

Look at the currency too. A report can mix euros, dollars and other currencies, or give an amount in its original currency with an exchange rate. Adding up different currencies gives a wrong total: handle each one separately, then convert it at a rate you write down.

Finally, some lines are negative: a return, a refund, a correction. They count like the others, as deductions, and must not be left out.

Totals

Why the totals must match

When the report states its own total (a total line, a summary, the amount paid), the sum of the lines you read must match it, to the cent. It is the simplest way to know nothing was lost along the way.

A gap means lines were missed or misread. The possible causes are mundane: a file cut short, a total line counted as a sale, a number written the English way (1,234.56) read the French way, where the comma marks the decimals.

So run two checks: the sum of the lines against the file's total, then the file's total against what actually reached your bank account. Until both match, better not to send any statement.

The lines add up to the file's total
The file's total matches what you received
A gap is understood before going further

A pen pointing at a table of figures, next to a calculator.

Pitfalls

Duplicates and lines outside the period

Two quiet pitfalls: the figures look right, but some sales count twice, or land in the wrong period.

The same file twice

A report forwarded by two people, or downloaded twice, and its sales count double. Before adding a file to your calculations, check it is not already there.

A corrected report

A distributor may send a corrected report for months it already reported. The new one replaces the old one: it is not added to it.

Overlapping months

A monthly report and a summary covering several months can include the same sales. Keep only one of them for the calculation.

Lines outside the period

A report received in July can hold sales from last year, reported late. Decide once and for all whether you count by month of sale or month of report (some contracts say), and stick to it: no line should be forgotten, or counted twice.

Frequently asked questions

A line matches no track: what now?

Look up its ISRC in your catalogue first: it is the surest way to find the recording. If the code is missing, the title, the artist and the release's UPC help. A line tied to no track cannot be paid to anyone: never leave one aside without knowing.

A line with no ISRC: is that normal?

It can happen for the sale of a whole album: the line then carries the release's UPC, with no per-track detail. If every track on the release has the same payees and the same rate, the maths can be done at release level. Otherwise the amount has to be split between the tracks, and the statement should say so.

What about two distributors?

That means two formats, two calendars and two totals to check, each on its own. The ISRC ties them together: in principle a recording keeps the same code whatever the distributor, so you can add everything up per track.

Should you keep reports after the statement?

Yes. They are the supporting documents for your statements: if the artist asks, they are what you will show the accountant they appoint. Keep each file exactly as you received it, with the statement it was used to calculate.

With Labelmate

What Labelmate does

When a report arrives by email, Labelmate spots it and offers to import it; you can also drop the file in yourself. It reads CSV, TSV, Excel or ZIP files as the distributor sends them, and recognises the format by its content, not its extension: the separator, how numbers are written, the columns.

For each distributor, the column mapping is saved once: which column holds the country, which one the net amount. During early access, we set up your distributor's format with you, from one of your real reports.

Before anything is saved, you see what Labelmate understood and the total it read. If the lines do not add up to the file's total, nothing is imported; a file already imported is refused, and a second report from the same distributor for the same months is flagged. After that, every line of a statement points back to the report rows it came from.