Billions of transactions run under the hoods of our favorite music platforms. Stem exists to help artists and teams make sense of the digital madness, sifting through streaming royalties so you don’t have to.

Dollar downloads and fractions of cents from streaming might not sound like a lot, but those pennies stack to the sky when you pool global music consumption. Accounting for every listen, from Australia to Saudi Arabia, takes Herculean effort. Distilling endless spreadsheets into actionable insights takes human-centered design. That’s our specialty.

Our goal goes beyond music distribution. Release day is the first step, but learning from what follows is where careers emerge and progress accelerates. From global heat maps tracking your art’s impact to easily-read breakdowns of your catalog’s earnings, here’s how Stem can help you make sense of your streaming data.

To learn more about royalties, read our articles “Music Publishing 101” and “10 Things To Do After Making Your Music Available Online.”

Check High-Level Performance In Seconds

Embracing simplicity doesn’t require sacrifice. The Stem Dashboard cleanly displays your total earnings collected during a selected date range. You can then interpret that data based on overall performance, top territories, DSP rank, content type and more. It’s never been easier to see what releases deserve wings (e.g. knowing when to make a music video) and whether others need additional fuel.

Every high-level metric provided by Stem—total download and streaming royalties from Japan, South Africa and Germany during the last 12 months—also exists on a per-song and per-project basis. That way, you can quickly check both the overall health of your operation and a particular track’s status without hassle. Comprehensive business updates at a glance enable educated, informed decisions on the fly.

Route Tours With Streaming Royalties

Fanbase geography informs the live portion of your business. We provide an accurate picture of where demand for your work originates so you can make a concerted effort to expand your presence in those regions. The data resulting from Stem’s worldwide reach allows us to not only show you where you’re most popular, but what songs are most popular in each country. In reality, you can design a setlist to reflect the tastes of the country you’re visiting.

The benefits of international expansion don’t stop at concerts. You can leverage music data when pitching to, or in conversation with, foreign programmers, brands, labels, artists and press. You can also use it to guide ad spend on social networks overseas. Take advantage of what’s not debatable and use your metrics to your advantage. If you’re trying to reach a New Zealand radio host, include a one-sheet that encompasses information relevant to the territory. The same logic applies to artists looking to land their first opening slot in their home city.

Segment Performance By Platform

 

Streaming services are retailers—storefronts comparable to Target and Best Buy. Treating them as such is mission-critical for an artist to maximize their influence and earnings potential.

Manufacturers like Adidas and Nintendo must understand where their products sell and how those sales contribute to overall revenues. Otherwise, they’d fail to judge current retail channels and aim to grow those channels further in the future. Music is no different.

Artists and teams can use Stem to immediately identify where their online audience likes to shop and respond accordingly. For example, if one platform drives 80 percent of your streaming royalties, incorporate that service’s branding in your release assets. Prioritize their URL. Conversely, consider platforms that are contributing nothing to your earnings as untapped markets worth exploring.

Learn From Your Music’s Lifecycle

You can’t measure everything with dollars and play counts: Perception, while intangible, defines what opportunities slide across your desk. With that said, many quantitative aspects of the music business helped shape the qualitative. Stem lets users view any upload’s performance in three-month, 12-month and lifetime intervals. From there, you can make estimated assumptions about how different rollout strategies influenced a song’s performance (and your bottomline). Did plays noticeably increase during the quarter you allocated funds to ad spend on Instagram? Did your earnings stagnate month-over-month despite that big PR push? Try to test new hypotheses regularly.

Know Your Worth

An artist can embody two different people: performer and songwriter. The rights and revenues allocated to each differ. Stem distinguishes between master income (for performers) and composition income (for composers and writers) to recognize that distinction, equipping you to know your worth on both sides of the spectrum.

Monitoring your streaming royalties in this regard can prove especially valuable when considering certain deals. Say a publisher offers you a $100,000 advance that they plan to recoup via your composition royalties and you’ve made $1,000 from said royalties after one year of making music. It becomes much easier to ask yourself (and the publisher!) if they have the resources, commitment and relationships to help close that delta.

Financial clarity lets you focus your efforts on what matters. Make smarter decisions. Make more time for what’s important to you. When it comes to the nitty gritty stuff, you can count on us.