Good Splits — a free tool for musicians — makes it easy to calculate Single Music royalties and split them up to collaborators.
Have you ever tried to calculate your Single Music song royalties and needed some help with the math? Royalty calculation (and splitting them among your collaborators) can be complicated and frustrating but, thanks to our friends at Good Splits, they don’t have to be anymore. They have made royalty calculating easier than ever before.
They hide the complicated accounting math inside a simple UI that lets you scan for the most important info and won’t overwhelm you with extra data. Sounds pretty rad, right?
Check out the instructions below to calculate royalties directly from a Single Music Export!
1. Download your sales report .csv file from Single Music.
Log in to your Single Music account and navigate to the Orders Tab. Click on the Export Order data button.
You will receive an email from Single Music with a button to download your sales data in a .csv
Good Tip: It’s always best to wait until the month has ended to download these reports since new royalties are added throughout the month.
2. Upload your Sales Report into Good Splits.
Just click the upload button and drag and drop your file in. You can also rename the file here and add a date range to help you organize your files down the road.
(Don’t have a Good Splits account yet? Sign up for a free account here. You will want to select Single Music ROyalties when it asks who your aggregator is.)
3. Select “Single Music Presets” to automatically populate and match Single Music’s column names that are in your file to Good Splits.
When your file has finished uploading, you’ll be prompted to match our Good Splits categories on the left to your document’s corresponding column name. For Single Music files, this is easy as pie. (Mmm, pie.)
Good Splits created a default setting so you can bypass this little part of the process by simply selecting “Single Music Presets” at the top of the modal. All the input fields below will automatically populate. Once you have reviewed these settings you can click the “Save Column Names” button and your file will be imported into Good Splits. Now, enjoy your pie.
Once you have reviewed these settings you can click Save Column Names. Your file will be imported into Good Splits.
4. Input splits.
After your sales report is uploaded, Good Splits will comb through your data to locate song titles and album titles. Then it’s time to tell Good Splits the splits for each song and which songs belong to each album.
Go to the songs tab where you will see the song titles from your .csv file.
Choose a song by clicking on the song name. It will expand and show you more details and some options for inputting splits. Click “edit” on the right hand side of the expanded row (which only appears the first time you edit the song).
Add as many collaborators as you need and enter their percentage splits for both master and publishing. Click save after each collaborator’s percentages are added.
You only have to add song splits once. And you can come back to edit the splits anytime.
Good Tip: No fear! Good Splits will remind you if your percentages don’t equal 100%.
5. Assign songs to albums.
(Good Splits recommends completing step 4 — adding song splits — before this step.)
Click on the albums tab. This will show you a list of your albums from your Single Music .csv.
Click on the album title and input the number of songs on the album and select the songs themselves from the pre-populated list. Then click the Save & Exit button. You can still edit the songs in the album at any time.
(Once a song has been assigned to an album, it will not appear as an option for other albums in your list.)
Good Tip: For singles, create an album with 1 song count and then assign the correct song. This will help calculate mechanical royalties owed.
6. 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. Good Splits was built to do the math in under two minutes, no matter how much good there is to split.
The start button appears in the top right when all the necessary data is collected. When you’re ready, just click Start.
7. See your earnings.
This is the fun part. You can find earnings in three different places in Good Splits.
The collaborator tab will display earnings broken down by songwriters and other collaborators. If you assigned shares to a record label, publisher, or other entity — their earnings will also show there.
The song tab displays earnings broken down by (you guessed it) song. You can also collapse the song menu to see each collaborator’s assigned splits.
The album tab displays earnings by Album. You can collapse each album’s menu to see assigned songs and collaborators.
Good Tip: Good Splits isn’t a payment tool, but you can use the payments tab to keep track of who you have paid.
See? We promised it would be easy.
Ready to try it for yourself? Sign up and create a free account here.
Have questions about Good Splits? Reach them here: yo@goodsplits.app
