The problem with play-count purgatory

In late August 2020, independent artist Lyrah was combing through her DistroKid royalty statements, tallying up the consumption numbers for her songs across various music streaming platforms over the last 18 months. Her 10 or so songs had altogether accumulated over a million plays in that time period — but she noticed one major oddity.

Her acoustic song “Down Low (Stripped)” had been added to Tidal’s curated playlist Pop Somber in July 2019 — but over a year later in August 2020, DistroKid still displayed only one play for the track from Tidal, according to a royalty report that she shared with me. Lyrah herself had listened to the Pop Somber playlist a few times, so while she didn’t know exactly how many times it was streamed in total, she knew it had to be more than once. (For comparison, the stripped-down version of “Down Low” has over 300,000 plays on Spotify.)

Why were there streams missing from the report? It wasn’t necessarily because of a crowded pipeline of middlemen; Lyrah distributes her music independently, and is registered as both the songwriter and performer for her catalog. Aside from DistroKid, there’s no other entity extracting fees in the distribution or royalty payment process. Lyrah asked a few of her musician and industry friends for advice, but struggled to get a clear sense of where to look to try resolving the issue.

Finally, in September 2020, Lyrah got a new report from DistroKid, and at last Tidal reported plays for “Down Low (Stripped)” from 14 months back. According to the report, the song had been streamed more than 5,000 times in July 2019.

OK, so the mystery was solved. Or was it? The long delays seemed unusual to Lyrah, and she wanted to dig deeper into the issue to prevent confusion moving forward. But a DistroKid support representative claimed to her that there was nothing wrong with her account or its integration with Tidal, and Lyrah could not reach anyone else from the company who might have had further insight.

This case raises a larger dilemma for artists and rights holders: Where do music streams go when they get lost? Is there a purgatory for some song plays that take a long time to show up on a distributor’s report? Are there certain plays that, for some reason or other, are never counted at all? And where do you even start if you want to find out the answers to these questions?

Behind the scenes, the time between when a music streaming subscriber presses play on a song and when a fraction of a penny makes it to the rights holder — and the path that interaction takes in the reporting process — remains complicated and hazy at best. There are plenty of challenges to be aware of when trying to monitor or audit this process, even (no, especially) if you own your own masters and are making the music-industry trek on your own as an independent artist.

The importance of streaming data for artists

Before diving into the black hole of stream counts, let’s briefly address the issue of streaming analytics at large, which play a role in artists’ abilities (or lack thereof) to catch these kinds of reporting anomalies more quickly.

Streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music offer analytics portals that let artists see how listeners discover and consume their music. Of course, data alone won’t pay artists’ rent, but it can help them better grow and plan their careers. “For a new release, the things I look out for are: How many streams, saves and repeat listeners are there? Who is discovering it? How are they discovering it, and how do I help more people like them discover it?” Lyrah tells me.

In contrast, Tidal does not provide artist data — at least not in any widely accessible or centralized way. There’s no dashboard or informational update that artists can sign up for, which means that artists who make their music available to Tidal subscribers are largely in the dark about how that music is doing or which playlists their songs are getting added to. If this kind of dashboard did exist, it would have helped an independent artist like Lyrah better understand that people had discovered and listened to her music via the Pop Somber playlist. It could have helped her figure out earlier on that those missing plays were floating somewhere between Tidal and DistroKid.

If Tidal wants to keep artists engaged with its platform, it will need to provide a central resource of data insights for artists and their management, comparable to what Spotify and Apple Music already offer. Even though Tidal typically pays out the highest royalty rates per stream (according to some public reports), it’s hard to imagine remaining truly competitive without giving artists more transparency into their catalog’s performance.

On the flip side, there are also steps distributors like DistroKid could take to make the future brighter for independent artists. “I would love to see more investment into developing the earnings data to be more visual and show long-term sustainability,” says Lyrah. “Right now streaming earnings feel more like scratching off a lottery ticket. You’re not sure what you’re about to refresh and see. Stream data can be uncertain, but how can the distributors communicate the data in a way that helps artists plan better for their future?”

The delay in reporting is serious business

Now, let’s go back to Lyrah’s DistroKid report. DistroKid’s FAQ makes it clear that the daily projections on reports can be inaccurate, and that artists distributing music through the service should wait two to three months to get accurate counts from streaming platforms for a given time period.

Upon further investigation, however, we see that Lyrah’s report shows an unusually long delay in reporting and payment times for Tidal, even with the above limitation in mind. Over the last 18 months, Apple Music processed Lyrah’s song plays the fastest — typically within one to two months. Plays on Spotify and Pandora were processed in around two months; those on Amazon Music Unlimited and Prime Music took between three and five months.

Tidal was the major outlier: Since Lyrah released her first EP in February 2019, it has taken an average of 14 months for the streaming service to report plays and pay out royalties. In an email, a DistroKid support representative tells me that Tidal streams specifically can take longer than other services to register in royalty reports, anywhere from six to 12 months — which still makes the case of “Down Low (Stripped)” strange even by DistroKid’s adjusted standards.

(The information displayed above includes the average payout rates and times for each service on Lyrah’s DistroKid report. Even though the royalty rates between Amazon Music Unlimited and Prime Music differ somewhat, they were combined here to represent expected rates from a mix of Unlimited subscribers and Prime subscribers. In general, royalty rates may differ based on artists’ contracts with labels or discounted plans or bundles that streaming services offer in certain markets, but this shows what an independent artist uploading their own music might see.)

One TuneCore user said they hadn’t seen those same delays from Tidal. TuneCore did not respond to several press requests about delay times or other related questions.

Beyond just reporting discrepancies, the frustration in delayed reporting and payments is really about losing time. Artists and their managers can’t capitalize on marketing opportunities if they don’t know how and when their music is being used. Had Lyrah known how many people listened and discovered her via the Pop Somber playlist, she may have made different choices about new songs to record or distribute sooner.

The recent comments from Spotify’s CEO Daniel EK about the speed at which musicians work — and his claim that working musicians “can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough” — has stirred up a lot of controversy. It’s a loaded statement, but underneath it, it assumes that artists have all the data they need to move as fast or slow as they want in the first place. In reality, cases like Lyrah’s suggest that  the music industry is not there yet. No one can really respond at the speed of TikTok when a streaming platform takes 14+ months to report and pay for play counts.

Hello? Is anyone there?

In trying to learn more myself about the potential issue of missing streams on royalty reports, I encountered the same issue as Lyrah: Nearly every door was closed. There’s little, if any, public information for inquiring about lost or missing plays, and I’m hard-pressed to find instructions for issuing a formal dispute or beginning an audit process with a given distributor.

When asked for comment, a PR rep for Tidal responded: “TIDAL is always happy to review [statements] with an artist if they’re seeing any issues. Artists can reach out through their distribution source.” When asked about this process, DistroKid did not seem to be aware of the option in the first place. Spotify would not confirm to me whether it had a formal audit process that rights holders could lean on.

Some record label contracts for popular artists do include audit clauses. For instance, Kanye West’s recently leaked recording contracts with Island Def Jam and Roc-A-Fella Records allow him to audit accounting and royalty statements from Universal Music Group. But even those clauses aren’t clear exactly how that audit would take place.

What about streams lost to fraud, to faulty metadata or to technical errors in data collection? Music-industry analysts and reporters estimate there are anywhere from $250 million to $2.5 billion in “blackbox” mechanical royalties that are not paid to songwriters and publishers, because streaming platforms and administrators like Harry Fox Agency cannot accurately match recordings to the right compositions (and vice versa).

Are affected rights holders ever notified about these errors as they happen? Do third-party companies regularly audit platforms’ data? No one I reached out to for comment would say, on or even off the record. In general, most questions I asked industry insiders about this topic seemed to elicit the equivalent of a 😒 emoji, and resulted in little formal information.

Given that the metric of play counts has direct influence on the way streaming subscription revenue is distributed among rights holders, it seems a bit wild that the business of play counts is so opaque. This underscores a crucial issue for artists in the streaming age: Streaming play count purgatory is hard to find, making it hard to leave.