Switching distributors without losing a month of royalties

Moving a catalog from one distributor to another is routine, and it is also the single most common way money goes missing. Not stolen — misplaced. The old distributor keeps reporting streams for months after the release has been taken down, the new one starts reporting before it has fully ramped, and for a while the same month exists on two statements from two companies. Most people stop downloading statements from the old one, and that is where the money goes.

Why the overlap exists

Stores report to distributors on a delay of roughly two to three months. When you take a release down from Distributor A on the first of March, streams from January and February have not been reported yet. They arrive in April and May, on Distributor A's statements, for a release that no longer exists on A.

Meanwhile you deliver the same recordings to Distributor B. B's first statement covers March, and it arrives in May or June. So for March you may see nothing from anyone for a while, and for January and February you will see A's tail long after you have mentally moved on.

Take the release down before the new one is live, and the same ISRC can exist twice on a store for a few days, which is a separate problem — stores will sometimes merge the two, sometimes not.

The order of operations

1. Deliver to the new distributor first, with the same ISRCs and the same UPCs. Same codes mean the stores treat it as the same release, keep play counts and playlist placements, and do not create a duplicate. Some distributors will assign new codes by default; do not let them.
2. Wait until the new delivery is live in every store you care about. Check the stores, not the distributor's dashboard.
3. Take the release down from the old distributor. Stores generally keep the version that arrived most recently.
4. Keep downloading statements from the old distributor for at least four months. Set a reminder. The tail is real money and it is only on those statements.
5. Import every statement from both distributors into one place, so you can see the month each one covers.

Overlap versus double count

When you look at the combined statements you will see a month — usually two — reported by both distributors. That is not automatically a double count. If the old distributor's rows for that month are for streams that happened before the switch and the new distributor's rows are for streams after it, both are real money and both are yours.

It is a double count if both distributors reported the same streams — which can happen when a store merged the two deliveries and paid both. You cannot tell which from the totals. You can tell from the per-store rows: if Spotify's units for the month on A's statement plus Spotify's units on B's statement add up to more than Spotify's own artist dashboard shows for the month, something was counted twice.

Any tool that combines the two statements should flag the overlapping months rather than silently summing or silently deduplicating. Silent summing may overstate; silent deduplication may throw away real money. The person with the contracts is the only one who can decide, and the tool's job is to point at the month.

The gap

The opposite problem is a month covered by neither distributor. That is nearly always a statement nobody downloaded — A's last one, or B's first — rather than a month with no earnings. A combined view that lists the missing months makes it obvious. Without it, the gap is invisible, because there is no row to notice.

What SNVRKOTICS does with this

Import every statement from every distributor into the same workspace. The statement reader detects the distributor from the file's headers, reads the period from each row, and then checks the periods across distributors: a month that appears on two statements is flagged above the totals as an overlap, and a month missing between the first and the last is flagged as a gap. Neither is resolved for you. Both are shown before the totals, so the caveat is read before the number.

The combined export puts every row on one sheet with its source statement beside it, so an accountant can see exactly which distributor reported what for the overlap months.