Good Splits Press Kit

Good Splits allows individuals responsible for divvying up song earnings to calculate royalties owed to collaborators fast and easy to determine payment splits fast and easy.

Once you have an account, simply upload your sales data file (.CSV) from your aggregator service, input splits for each collaborator, and easily see who is owed what amount for the payment period of your choice—no math required.

Users can sort and edit their data by artist, song or album. The Artist view is anyone who has a share of the song, both master and publishing. The Song view allows you to edit which percentage each party owns of each song. Finally, the Album view shows earnings by album, including totals for each song on the album.

There’s simply no other tool out there like Good Splits. It helps musicians see what they owe to their collaborators. So whoever’s cutting the checks (musicians or business managers) can do it more efficiently and on a shorter timetable. That means not only are more people paid more often for their work, there is full transparency into how those royalties were calculated.

This is a tricky question, but in order to answer it, you have to know how royalties are created in the first place. We hope this provides some clarity:

1. In order for a song to be shared or streamed, it first must be distributed to Digital Service Providers (DSPs) like iTunes and Spotify. Most musicians currently distribute songs through aggregator services like Tunecore, AWAL, cdbaby, Distrokid, Symphonic, and oneRPM.
2. When a song is sold or streamed, DSPs pay the revenue earned to the distributing aggregator service. The aggregator service then distributes the money to the individual who originally registered that song.
3. The user who distributed the song receives 100% of earnings from the DSP through the aggregator service. They are now responsible for divvying up the earnings to their collaborators (roles like songwriters, publishers, producers, sound engineers, and more).
4. Musicians sometimes hire a business manager to calculate what they owe to whom. Smaller artists (80% of the music industry) usually do this on their own. And it’s not easy. The more music you make (and the more widely distributed it is), the more unwieldy the calculations can get. And since it takes a long time, even if collaborators do end up seeing those checks, it can be up to eight or nine months later.

The user who receives earnings from DSPs through their aggregator service can more easily calculate what they owe to whom. Good Splits hides all the ugly math in a simple UI so anyone can use it.

Collaborators can better audit the individuals who distribute the songs to DSPs via aggregator services, allowing for more transparency to teams. Creators get paid more often.

Nope. Good Splits is not a payment tool—musicians still have to issue those payments themselves—but it does help speed up the process by showing you who is owed what for which songs.

We released the beta version in 2019 and now have 30+ positive testimonials from both individual musicians (Fleurie, Angelo Petraglia, etc.), producers (Tony Esterly, Jeremy Lutito, etc.), and several managers (Valeo Arts Management, Hard8 Management, etc.).

Good Splits is currently free for musicians, managers, publishers, and record labels.

Because the royalty payment process is so complicated, it’s difficult for musicians to have a good idea of how much revenue their work generates. Understanding their value in the marketplace allows musicians to better plan for their futures and shape their careers. Good Splits is one way to deliver that information.

Fundamentally, we believe the music industry can be better. Transparency, smart technology, and honest people can help make those changes.