Getting Started With Good Splits — The Simple Royalty Earnings Calculator

Published in

Good Splits

6 min readAug 5, 2020

QUICK START GUIDE: How to calculate your publishing and mechanical royalties from streaming and downloads with Good Splits.

There are lots of fun features in Good Splits. Watch our overview video to get started or continue reading to find the sections you need.

VIDEO: Quick Start Tutorial

TOPICS

Accessing Good Splits
Uploading a Sales Report
Setting up Song Ownership
Configuring Albums
Calculating Splits

OTHER FEATURES

Merging Songs
Merging Albums
Exporting Splits
Exporting Owners
Accessing File History
Using Payments Tab

Access Good Splits

Username: Use the email associated with your registration.
Password: You can set or reset your password by pressing the forgot password button.

Upload a File

When you log in to Good Splits, click the “Upload Sales Report” button.

Drag and drop or upload your .csv file into the modal.

Your .csv must have the following information (column names):
-Sales Type
-Release Type (whether it is a song or album)
-Artist (name)
-Song Name
-Album Name
-Units Sold
-Total Sales

Name or Match Columns in Your File

When your file has finished uploading, you’ll be prompted to match our Good Splits categories on the left side of the modal to your document’s corresponding column name (which will be entered on the right).

For some aggregators like Tunecore, Single Music, Distrokid and CD Baby we’ve created presets. All you have to do is select one of the presets at the top of the modal and all of the input fields below will automatically populate. Once you have reviewed these settings you can click Save Column Names and your file will be imported into Good Splits.

Configuring Albums

In order to calculate album sales/plays versus song sales/plays you’ll need to identify which songs are on which albums.

Click edit songs on the album row, input the number of songs on the album, and select the songs themselves from the pre-populated list. Then click the Save Album button on that album row. You’ll be able to go back and edit this before you calculate if you need to adjust.

Note: Singles will need to live in an album with one song.

Continue to assign songs to all of the albums that are in your file. Then click “Assign Songs” at the bottom of the modal to continue to the next step.

*Don’t have all this info handy? Choosing “Skip & Assign Later” will take you out of the upload process and you won’t be able to calculate your payments until you do. But your work will save and you can come back later to complete it!

Set up Song Ownership

Now it’s time to tell Good Splits the splits for each song.

Click “Edit Split” on the song row, add your collaborator’s name, email, and their percentage splits for both master and publishing. Collaborators added from previous uploads will appear in the dropdown. Emails are required for each collaborator (but they aren’t contacted unless you decide to send them money through Good Splits later).

Add as many collaborators as you need for each song, clicking “Save” on the song row after each song is completed. You must account for 100% between all composers in a song. If necessary, you can assign percentages to an unknown placeholder entity (like a publishing company).

Just like with albums, you only have to do this the first time a song is uploaded. Split info will save for all future uploads with this song!

Once you’ve added all of your Splits, click “Save Splits” to move to the next step.

Good Tip: No fear! We’ll remind you if your percentages don’t equal 100%.

Need to copy and paste the same split info across multiple songs? You can use our Bulk Splits option! Select all the songs that have duplicate info and a button will appear that allows you to set splits across multiple songs. Learn more in our Bulk Splits guide.

Calculate Splits

Start the calculation engine!

Is all your data in? So much data, in fact, that you’re worried it might take all night to crunch the numbers? Not a problem. We built Good Splits to do the math in under two minutes, no matter how much good there is to split.

Simply confirm all of the information looks correct on the summary screen, then select “Save and Continue”. If you need to edit split or album info for this file, you can go back to do that now. If you need to adjust this later, you will have to recalculate the file.

To begin the calculation, select “Save and Continue”

OTHER FEATURES

Merging Songs

The Merge Songs feature allows you to map one song into another song.

You might want to use this feature if the same song shows up with two slightly different versions of the same name in your .csv file. (Example: Spotify lists your song as “PB and Jams” but Apple Music lists the same song as “PB & Jams.”)

No worries. You can tell Good Splits this is actually the same song. By merging “PB & Jams” into “PB and Jams,” you can now count everything under “PB and Jams.”

To find Merge Songs, go to the Catalog tab, then click the three dots (mini menu) next to the song in the row.

In the Merge Songs modal, search for the song you want to keep in the top field. Choose the song you want to merge (and lose from your song list) in the bottom field. Don’t forget to Save & Close.

Merging Albums

Merge Albums works the same way as Merge Songs. Just follow the same steps as above from the Albums list in the Catalog tab.

Exporting Splits

The Splits Export will export your calculated data to a new .csv. This can be handy in checking your data mappings and ensuring all your data uploaded properly.