Getting paid as an artist on iTunes and Spotify?

October 16, 2021 12:44 PM

I am a professional musician who makes a significant portion of my living through music sales. A lot of these are through iTunes and Spotify. There is a problem.

I don’t receive statements from either of these companies to my knowledge, I have no idea how my sales are doing until I receive a random payment and then divide the payment by the cost of a song to see what I sold, and this makes it impossible to budget or know anything about how my music sales are performing. I would like to be able to access my sales any time I want, and I would like a breakdown of what I sold. I would also like to understand how often I’m supposed to be getting paid from these companies. Is there anything I can do?

posted by jitterbug perfume to Media & Arts (2 answers total)

Who is your distributor? They should be helping you with this. If they are not, consider using a different distributor. Also Spotify for Artists and Apple Music for Artists will give you some analytics to understand how things are going at any point in time (though it is nontrivial to translate these numbers to actual dollars for a variety of reasons).
posted by primethyme at 12:59 PM on October 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

You wouldn't be receiving statements from either of them directly. You distributor would. I use Distrokid, and you can see a report of all the payouts (all 37 cents of them!) from each of the streaming services. Your distributor should be able to give you the same.
posted by jonathanhughes at 1:44 PM on October 16, 2021 [1 favorite]