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Tuesday, March 4, 2014

DistroKid.com Part 14

I am happy to report that DistroKid continues to move forward in delivering on its promises. It has reported on iTunes, iTunes Match and Spotify through December 2013. Google Play and Amazon still reflect they are "Coming soon."

While it would be great to see more income from the one album and one song, I didn't expect anything from them since there's been no marketing or advertising -- just the mention on this blog.

I like the way DistroKid lays out the data on the "Bank" link. More about that below.

I put in a request for withdrawal of some of the earnings, and that went through without a hitch. You need a PayPal account to receive the funds. My withdrawal was $44.16, minus the $0.88 PayPal fee.

In the Withdrawal area, there is a link to "excruciating detail" regarding the earnings. The word "excruciating" is an understatement! There is a listing for every sale and royalties from each stream. The info for each row includes:

  1. Sale Month
  2. Store (iTunes, Spotify, etc.)
  3. Artist
  4. Title (Name of album or song)
  5. Quantity
  6. Customer Paid (song/album cost to customer
  7. Your Royalties (EUR, USD, CAD, etc.)
  8. Country of Sale
  9. Exchange Rate (USD)
  10. Tax Withheld
  11. Earnings (USD)
The rows are grouped by Title and that is presently hard coded. The groups of titles are not in alphabetical order.

iTunes sales are listed in three columns (Album, Song and Quantity). There were six albums and two songs sold. The earnings were among the "excruciating detail" listings.

iTunes Match has three columns (Album, Song and Streams). Every song on the album was streamed twice on iTunes Match (42 streams total), which generated royalties of $0.09! While that is a very low per stream rate, iTunes Match stores customer's entire music collection and streams it from the cloud to any device. If they stream your music (whether they bought it on iTunes or not), you get paid for the stream.

The Spotify information has the same column names as iTunes Match. There were many more streams because the music has been on Spotify for almost as long as they have been in the iTunes store. These streams range from a high of 67 down to 11. A total of 492 streams generated $2.41. That's almost half a cent per play.

DistroKid remained true to it's promise not to take a cut of any of the royalties. They have passed all royalties on to me.

I'll report more when the "Coming Soon" services come through.