The Guide to Good Splits Column Naming

Ready to name your columns from your uploaded sales report? Here’s everything you need to know.

Ready to use Good Splits to calculate your royalties? You’ll need to have a .csv file with your earnings, which you can download from your distributor’s site.

This post will help provide some guidance on aligning the fields from your sales report document (which just means making sure all the right columns translate to the right data in the tool.)

After you upload your sales document from your music aggregator you’ll need to match our Good Splits categories (on the left) to your document’s corresponding column name (which you will input on the right).

Sales Type

This field identifies if the data is from a streaming play or a download.

Once you identify the column that contains this overall title, then tell us which title your document usess for “streaming” and which they use for “downloads.”

Subfields will be ignored if you leave them blank.

Release Type

This field identifies if the data is from a Song (single) or an Album.

Once you tell us what name document uses for this column, then you can tell us what which term they use for “Song” and which they use for “Album.” This is required because the sale of an Album and Song requires a mechanical royalty calculation.

What if I don’t have a Release Type column?

Depending on the format, your .csv may be missing a “Release Type” column (which designates if the item is a song or an album). If you don’t see that column mapped, simply hover over the question mark icon for “Release Type” click “No Release Type?” and choose to use our “Release Type Logic” in the pop up.

If selected, Good Splits will identify Album sales by looking for rows of data where the Song Title is blank and the Sales Type is download.

For many distributors, this is how you can identify when an album has sold. Song sales will be identified where Song Title is present and Sales Type is Download. All other cases are regarded as streaming.

Country of Sale

This field identifies where the sale was made. Mechanical royalties are calculated for songs sold in the US and CAD based on the statutory rates.

Artist

This is used to identify when a new song is present in the import. To find unique songs we match both Artist and Song Title.

Album Name

Good Splits will assign every song to an album (including singles). Every unique Album name will be added to the Good Splits as an album. Singles can be mapped to the 1 song on that album.

Units Sold

This includes the units streamed and sold in your file. The units sold is the most important because it contributes to mechanical royalty calculations.

Total Sales

This should be the dollar value you want to use as your total for calculations. This should be in USD (US Dollars). The base currency in Good Splits is USD.

And there you have it. Once we know all your column names, we can go to the next step, which is adding splits!

To learn more about how to use Good Splits, check out Getting Started with Good Splits.