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Field notes on reading, converting and reconciling music royalty statements — from a single DistroKid export to a whole catalogue. Written to be genuinely useful; the free converter does the same work in one step.
Release through more than one distributor — or collect from a PRO and the MLC on top — and your income arrives as several files, each on its own timeline and in its own shape. Here is how to combine royalty statements from multiple distributors into one normalised, per-song view, and reconcile that merged total back to the money that actually reached your bank.
You check Spotify for Artists, do the mental maths, open your DistroKid statement — and the numbers don't match. You are not being cheated: you are comparing two systems that were never built to tie exactly. One counts plays; the other counts money, months later, after filtering, per-market rates and currency conversion. Here is precisely why they diverge, and how to reconcile line-by-line so you can tell a normal timing gap apart from money that is genuinely missing.
Search "convert royalty statement to Excel" and you are pointed at generic PDF- and CSV-to-Excel converters that know nothing about music. They flatten the statement's structure, round the tiny per-stream amounts that make up most of a catalogue's income, and turn long barcodes into scientific notation, leaving a tidy-looking sheet you still cannot total by DSP or reconcile. Here is what actually goes wrong, and what a music-aware conversion produces instead.
It is 1099 season, and the figure your distributor reports to the IRS almost never matches the money that reached your bank. That gap is normal: gross royalties before fees, minus any withholding, and sometimes minus whatever PayPal also reported. But you have to explain it before you file. Here is how to report music royalties on taxes by reconciling your 1099 to your own records, catching the PayPal double-count, and handing your accountant one clean number.