How SoundCloud Royalties Work Through Symphonic

New to SoundCloud? No problem! As I refrain from first asking if you live under a rock, let me reassure you that making money on SoundCloud is easy for artists of any level. As long as you’ve started distributing your music to SoundCloud through our distribution service, you can start collecting royalties. In this post, we’ll show you how to do it.

How SoundCloud Royalties Work Through Symphonic

Here’s how it works…

In order to begin collecting SoundCloud Royalties with Symphonic, we need to make sure our clients have opted into our SoundCloud Distribution Services. The quickest way to opt in is within your SymphonicMS account. To do so, click on Rights → SoundCloud. – Next, you’ll be prompted to fill out our SoundCloud Distro service opt-in.

To ensure everything goes smoothly during this process, you’ll need to do things like:

• Send over your SoundCloud Profile URL so we can map your releases correctly and correct traction is tracked.
• Send over your SoundCloud Profile URL so we can allowlist your profile.

If you are thinking of privately sharing your music (for instance pre-save/publicist/opportunities) you may upload your delivered track to your own SoundCloud profile. However, because you have delivered said track through us (your trusty distributor), SoundCloud will make sure to protect your content.

Note: It’s very important that you send over your SoundCloud profile so we can allowlist it to avoid any issues down the line.

With this, we make sure that your music gets delivered to both SoundCloud and SoundCloud Go. Once your music has been delivered, here’s where the royalty collection comes in.

Reporting & Payments

As with any other DSP royalty payout, there is an estimated reporting and payment schedule for SoundCloud. However, it’s important to keep in mind that reports can sometimes arrive late from partners and, in turn, are added on to the next reporting period.

If this happens, you can expect a report after a calendar month has passed to cover a month that passed 2 months prior. This happens because it may take up to 60 days for Symphonic to receive payment and/or even statements, so we’ll need a month in between to ensure payment has been collected before paying everything out to you.

• To help you out, we’ve actually created a full chart that includes estimated posting dates, payment dates, estimated dates to set splits for Payees, and so much more. Check all of that out (and more) right here.

——

📚 Sharpen your SoundCloud skills…

8 Ways To Grow Your SoundCloud Community

How To Advertise on SoundCloud as an Independent Musician

How To Book a Tour Using Spotify and Soundcloud Analytics

——

Playlist Pitching

Please note that once you opt-in for SoundCloud Distribution services via us … we can start pitching your music to SoundCloud for playlisting opportunities! (Only offered for Distribution clients – not starter accounts). Our team will be sure to reach out if you are selected for any playlisting opportunities.

Some final thoughts…

Before we wrap things up here, it’s important we touch on the very real issue of streaming fraud. SoundCloud definitely takes this into account when sending out royalties to each of our clients, so it’s very important that you are implementing best practices online as you continue to release music. Even if you aren’t intentionally participating in streaming fraud, some seemingly legit services may claim to get you thousands of streams or followers overnight while what they’re really doing is using bots of their own to cheat the system.

Whether your involvement in streaming fraud is intentional or not, you will suffer the consequences either way. Some of which may be your account being banned, or even terminated completely. Be very careful with how and where you spend your hard earned money. Always do your research on every company you plan to go into business with, talk to prior clients, review testimonials, and make sure you’re spending your dollars wisely.

Good luck!