Analyzing Your Royalty Statements
Understanding your royalty statements can reveal how much you earn per stream across platforms and countries. Using tools like the free DistroKid royalty analyzer helps visualize payments over time without manual spreadsheets.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today I want to walk you through some interesting aspects of a DistroKid royalty statement, although a lot of this information will apply to any distributor.
BUT, if you do use DistroKid you can follow along at home because I made a free DistroKid royalty analyzer tool. Click here to check it out, no strings attached and no email required (although obviously I already have your email if you’re reading this lol). Your royalty statement is not uploaded, it’s processed locally on your computer.
One of the reasons I made this free tool is because I wanted to easily graph bank statements from DistroKid over time. It’s nice to know how much money you’re getting monthly, and how much you’re paid per stream on different platforms - but making spreadsheets for this can be a chore.
But let’s look at some interesting data point. The first is one i’ve talked about before, which is the average payment per stream on Spotify broken down by country.
Just so you know, for all the images in this email the artist in question is using Discovery Mode so keep that in mind, as that reduces the average payment per stream on Spotify.
Often Brazil and Mexico are cheap countries for running Meta ads, which can be great for triggering the algorithm. But the tradeoff is they pay 1/3rd of what the US pays, and about ¼ of what the UK pays per stream. While it’s not all about the money by any means, it’s good to be aware of this discrepancy so you can account for it.
Typically one strategy is to use Brazil / Mexico, and other cheaper ad countries to trigger the algorithm on Spotify, and when that happens it mostly ends up being in Tier 1 countries that pay much better.
What about Apple Music?
There are definitely some differences between countries, but interestingly Brazil pays about the same as the US here. I’d be interested to know if anyone else finds this to be the case as well!
But also, GB (United Kingdom) pays over 1 penny per stream on Apple Music - nice! They’re one of the best paying countries for Spotify as well. I wonder if this is due to legislation in the UK or because people in the UK just pay more for Spotify / Apple Music than most other countries.
Now, let’s look at YouTube Music.
Here the US pays almost 1 penny per stream - nice! Unfortunately the UK isn’t on this table so they didn’t make the top 10 highest streamed countries for this artist, meaning we don’t see the results. But it’s cool to see that Brazil and Mexico on YouTube Music pay nearly as much as the US does on Spotify.
Just a reminder, if you haven’t yet please consider submitting your Spotify for Artists data to help us out with our Spotify algorithm study! This video explains how it works:
If you want to learn how to promote your music on streaming services using Meta ads check out my course Spotify Growth Machine.
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