How to read a DistroKid royalty statement, column by column

A DistroKid earnings export is a CSV with fifteen columns and, for a catalog of any age, tens of thousands of rows. Most people open it once, see a wall of $0.003 entries, and close it. That is a mistake, because the file is the only complete record of what the catalog earned — the dashboard is a summary of it, not the other way round.

Here is what every column means, which ones carry the money, and where the file misleads people who read it quickly.

The fifteen columns

These are the headers exactly as DistroKid writes them:

Column	What it holds
Date Inserted	When DistroKid added the row to your account. Ignore it.
Reporting Date	When the store reported the sale to DistroKid.
Sale Month	The month the stream or sale actually happened.
Store	Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, YouTube, and so on.
Artist	The artist name on the release.
Title	The track title.
ISRC	The recording's code. One per track, for life.
UPC	The release's barcode. One per album or single.
Quantity	Streams, downloads or views, depending on the store.
Team Percentage	Your share if the release uses DistroKid's split feature.
Source Type	The kind of transaction the store reported.
Country of Sale	Where the listener was.
Songwriter Royalties Withheld (USD)	Mechanicals held back for a publishing administrator.
Earnings (USD)	What you were paid for the row.
Recoup (USD)	Anything recovered against an advance or a fee.

Three of these carry the money: Earnings (USD) is what you got, Quantity is what it was for, and Store is who paid it. Everything else is context.

Reporting Date and Sale Month are not the same month

This is the first trap. A stream that happened in January is typically reported to DistroKid in March, sometimes later. The row's Sale Month says January; its Reporting Date says March.

If you total the file by Reporting Date, you get a picture of DistroKid's cash flow to you. If you total it by Sale Month, you get a picture of your catalog's actual performance. They are different pictures, and the second one is the one that tells you whether a release worked.

Any tool that reads the file should prefer Sale Month. SNVRKOTICS's statement reader does, and says so in the export it produces.

The sub-cent rows are real money

The second trap. In a real DistroKid export we have worked with — 50,884 rows — 29,840 of them earn less than half a cent each. Rounded to cents, they are $0.00. Added up as reported, they are a meaningful share of the file.

A reader that rounds each row to the nearest cent before summing loses every one of those. A reader that truncates loses even more. The correct method is to keep the third decimal the file gives you, sum in integers, and round once at the end. If a tool reports a lower total than DistroKid's own dashboard, this is the first thing to suspect.

It also means a row with Quantity 3 and Earnings $0.00 is not a fraudulent or unpaid stream. It is a paid stream that rounds to nothing on its own. Do not filter these out.

Store names carry territory and tier

DistroKid writes some stores as "Spotify" and others with a suffix — a territory, a product tier, a partner name. For a per-store breakdown, those are one store. If your spreadsheet shows Spotify twice with different totals, that is why, and a pivot on the raw Store column will always split them.

Country of Sale is a code, not a name

ISO 3166-1 alpha-2: US, GB, DE, NZ. Other distributors write the same countries as names. If you ever combine a DistroKid file with anything else, the two have to be brought to one spelling before a country breakdown means anything.

What to do with it

Total Earnings (USD) by Sale Month and check it against the dashboard's monthly figures; they should match to the cent once sub-cent rounding is handled. Then total by Store, and look at the share of the top one. If it is above sixty percent, most of your income depends on one company's playlist and payout decisions, and that is worth knowing before you plan a release.

The SNVRKOTICS statement reader does all of the above on import: it detects a DistroKid export by its headers, prefers Sale Month, keeps integer cents, canonicalises store names and country codes, and shows the breakdown by store, country, track and month. The export it produces is one workbook of live formulas over every row.