Next steps
- See how periods are named in What does the period name mean?.
- See when a period reaches you in When are new statements published?.
Detailed page
Why are streams from an earlier month only showing now?
Why sales reach your statement later than they happened.
Sales reach you through two steps, and each one takes time.
First the stores report. A stream played in January is reported to your record company’s distributor, and on to your record company, weeks or months later. Nobody has the data before that.
Then your record company runs a period. They import the sales files they’ve received, calculate the royalties, review the result and publish it. Their accounting frequency sets how often that happens: a company accounting quarterly publishes four times a year, however often the stores report.
The period name refers to the accounting period the sales were booked into, not the month they happened. Sales lines carry their own sale date, so the Sales CSV is where you can see when each sale actually occurred.
A store can also report a sale late or correct an earlier report. Those lines arrive in whichever period they’re imported into, which is why a track that was quiet for months can show a small amount long after its release.