We’ve received a number of messages from clients regarding this month’s royalty report and would like to clarify the methods we use for our reporting.
We send royalty statements to all clients on the first Monday of each month. At 9am PST we look through our received royalties from all stores and mark all of those for which we have received payment into our bank account. Only those that we have received payment for are included in the royalty reports sent to our clients.
This means that if a store partner is late in sending us payment for any royalties then they are not included in the royalty report. Similarly, if a store partner sends us payment earlier than usual, this can mean that we may include more than one month’s worth of royalties in a single royalty report. For example in this month’s royalty report we included both January and February reports for YouTube.
A lot of people today asked “where are this month’s Spotify royalties?” The short answer is that you received them last month. You may have noticed in your February report that you received payment for both December and January royalties for Spotify. This was because Spotify was early in paying their January royalties. As of 9am this morning on April 4th 2017, they have not yet paid us for February royalties and so they are not included in our March royalty report.
We are sorry if any of you are inconvenienced by our reporting methods. Unfortunately we have no control over when the stores decide to pay us. In the case of Spotify, we were hoping that their early payment of the January royalties was a sign that they would continue to pay royalties earlier, however this turned out not to be the case. We think it makes sense to keep a fixed schedule for our reporting and not delay our reports indefinitely while awaiting action from stores as we do not receive indication as to when they expect to make payment. We also do not think it is right to hold off of paying royalties for a store to our clients if they are paid early.
In addition to this some clients may have noticed they received multiple royalty reports from us – this was due to an issue with a payment from Amazon accidentally being deducted from your first payment. The second payment received is to re-instate this deduction and will not need to be processed.
We request that you study your royalty reports carefully to see which stores and periods are included in each, and as always if you have any questions please email us at the usual address.