How to read a royalty statement
Every society exports a different shape, none of them label the same thing the same way, and the file is usually thousands of rows long. A single quarter from ASCAP can run to more than twenty-five thousand lines, which is why opening it in a spreadsheet tells you almost nothing.
You can read any of them here for free, in your browser, without making an account. Below is what the confusing parts actually mean.
Why one line does not equal one airing
A statement line is an aggregate. BMI reports a cue that played 72 times as one row with a count of 72, and ASCAP, SESAC and PRS each have a count column of their own (Number of Plays, Performance, Number of Perfs). So the row count tells you almost nothing about airplay: the count column does, and the money column tells you about income, and the two are not the same story.
The channel is usually blank
This surprises everyone. On most cable, syndicated and foreign money the society leaves the channel field empty, and on a real composer's account that can be the large majority of the income. It is not an error and it is not missing money: the society simply did not report where it aired at that level.
What it usually does report is the programme. Grouping by show rather than channel is the difference between "80% of my income came from somewhere unnamed" and an actual list of the productions paying you.
Foreign money arrives converted, or not
A statement from a foreign society may report in its own currency with no column anywhere saying so. SOCAN pays in Canadian dollars; nothing in the file announces it. Reading those figures as US dollars overstates the total by roughly forty percent, and it is an easy mistake to make silently.
A performance count of zero is not nothing
Foreign income often arrives with money attached and no performance count at all, because the local society settled it in bulk. Those lines cannot be checked against an airing, which matters if you are ever trying to work out what went unpaid: a line with no count is not evidence of anything either way.
Which societies can be read here
ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, PRS, SOCAN, GEMA, SACEM, SIAE, TONO, JASRAC, the MLC and SoundExchange are recognised automatically, across eighteen different export formats. Anything else can be mapped by pointing out its columns once.
Column-by-column guides:
Common questions
Is anything uploaded?
No. The free reader parses the file in your browser. It never leaves your machine and there is no account to create.
What format does my statement need to be in?
The CSV your society exports, or an Excel .xlsx file, which is read from its first sheet. A PDF cannot be read, because a PDF has no columns to map, only a picture of them, and a .zip needs unpacking first so the statement inside can be dropped in.
Why does my total not match the society's?
Most often the export was truncated, or the statement is in a currency the file never named. Both are worth checking before assuming the society made a mistake.
Related
- Looking for a TRQK alternative? — what you can use today now that TRQK has wound down.
- TuneSat and ONTRK: which does what — detection and royalty statement analysis are two different problems.
- Why didn't I get paid for my TV placement? — what a statement cannot show you, and how to find it.
- All guides — every society, and every question composers ask about their statements.
Point it at a statement and look.
Free, no account, about a minute. If you want every statement kept and compared across quarters afterwards, that is $9 a month.
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