When we were trying to get my family's olive oil business going, my brothers were having a conversation about distribution and I could barely get a word in. So Abdulaziz asked me to write him an email, which, as anyone who has received an email from me knows, was a dangerous invitation.
My father and his brothers had farms up north, and my late uncle had produced an olive oil that won best in the country. We had the packaging, we had the name, and we had the product. What I could contribute was an explanation of how record labels move physical goods through distributors, because that was the version I knew: percentages off the top, reserves, returns, marketing costs, all the things between selling something and actually getting paid for it.
I told him I knew nothing about agriculture. I did, however, have quite a lot to say about a distributor statement.
One part of that work deserves its own explanation, especially if you're a label about to move your catalog. Everybody plans the switch. Fewer people plan the months after it, when the new distributor is reporting one set of sales and the old one is still sending money from another.
That trailing income is normal. Platforms report on a lag, so moving your releases doesn't bring the old reporting cycle to a tidy stop. Keep the old account in your reconciliation, and check the sales period behind each payment before deciding that revenue has disappeared or that the new distributor has somehow paid you twice.
Then there's whatever the old distributor is still holding. A reserve needs a release schedule, and an outstanding advance needs to be dealt with under the agreement. Ask for the closing position in writing while everybody is still answering emails about the move. Future you will be grateful, particularly if future you is somebody who hasn't joined the label yet.
The catalog itself needs care too. Coordinate the transfer, retain the existing identifiers where appropriate, and check that the audio and metadata match. A re-upload doesn't automatically wipe out a track's history; Spotify has a track-linking process that can preserve play counts. But I'd want somebody checking that it actually worked before taking down the old delivery. "We used the same ISRC" is a useful starting point, and I still want to see the result.
On the accounting side, keep both distributors on one switchover sheet, by sales period and recording, with the reported income and the payment beside it. Overlapping periods need explaining. They don't automatically mean duplicate income, because two files can cover the same month and report different sales. Go back to the underlying detail before deleting anything that looks familiar.
Keep that sheet open until the trailing reports and payments have been accounted for, and get written confirmation of anything still outstanding. Put a date beside the next expected payment so somebody knows when to follow up.
Anyways, this is what happens when my family asks me about olive oil. I start talking about royalty statements. The oil really is phenomenal, though.
Tell me what you're working on.