Decompose to a use
Any figure should lead back to the thing that produced it: a work, a channel, a territory, a period. A total that cannot be walked back is a claim, and you are being asked to take it on trust.
Statements
A statement you cannot take apart is one you can only believe.
Most royalty statements are a total and a date. That is enough to accept and not enough to check, which is the same problem the industry has with unidentified money, arriving in your inbox instead of a spreadsheet.
The test
Three things a statement has to do to be worth reading.
Not “be detailed” — detail is easy to produce and hard to use. These are the properties that let you disagree with a number, which is the only thing that makes agreeing with one mean anything.
Say what did not match
A statement that only shows what worked is a statement hiding its own error rate. What is still unmatched or in conflict belongs on it too — that is the part you might be able to help resolve, and the part nobody else shows you.
Reconcile with the other side
The lines that justify what you were paid should be the same lines that justified what a licensee was charged. One set of evidence, read from two ends. When those are separate documents, at least one of them is decorative.
Where you open it
The same system it was produced in.
A statement in the portal is not a PDF of a report. It is a view onto the data the distribution was assembled from, so it can be opened, sorted and drilled into rather than read.
- The period, then the channels
Start with what came in and where from. Digital, radio and TV, background music and live are separate figures, because they are separately measured and separately reliable.
- Down to the work
Every work with earnings, with its identifiers and its share, and the usage that produced it. This is the level where a disagreement becomes specific enough to act on.
- What was retained
Gross collected and administration fee are both on it, against the usage they relate to. A fee you cannot locate is a fee you cannot check.
- Territory by territory
Collection mapped by country, so a market producing nothing shows up as a gap rather than as an absence you never noticed.
- Unmatched and in conflict
Registrations still being resolved, duplicates found, claims contested. Present on purpose, because the alternative is a cleaner document that tells you less.
- Exportable
The lines come out as data. A statement you can only view is a statement you cannot reconcile against your own books.
How to read one
Four steps, and the fourth is the one nobody else can offer you.
Worth doing in this order the first time. Each step narrows the question, so by the fourth you are looking at a single use rather than at a total you cannot argue with.
Open the period
Pick the distribution. The header is the total, and the total is the least interesting number on the page — it is the thing everything else explains.
- Total collected, and what was retained
- The period it covers
Check it against the channels
Split the total four ways. A channel that moved sharply against the others is either something real about your catalogue or something wrong with a report, and both are worth knowing.
- Digital, radio and TV, background music, live
- Each against the previous period
Drill into a work
Take the works that moved and look at them individually — shares, identifiers, territories. Most surprises resolve here, and the ones that do not are usually a registration problem rather than a collection one.
- Shares and identifiers as registered
- Which territories paid, and which did not
Find the usage behind the line
Go from a figure to the uses that produced it. This is the step that separates a statement from a claim, and it is the one you should ask any rights manager to demonstrate before you sign with them.
- Which platform or broadcaster reported it
- What was matched, and on which identifier
- What is still unmatched, and why
Next step
Ask to be shown a statement before you sign anything.
Not a sample document — the actual view, with the drill-down working. It is a fair question to ask anybody managing your rights, and the answer tells you most of what you need to know.