Royalty Math · 6 min read

The 5 columns in your Spotify CSV that actually matter

Spotify hands you 18 columns. Five drive your royalty math. The rest is metadata.

If you're trying to fold streaming numbers into a royalty tracker — your own spreadsheet, a bookkeeper's template, or a tool like My Royalty Tracker — knowing which columns to wire up (and which to ignore) is the difference between a 30-second import and an afternoon of cleanup.

Here are the five.

1. Date (or Reporting Period)

What it tells you: which calendar period the streams happened in.

The catch: Spotify exports it in a few different formats depending on which report you pull. Sometimes it's YYYY-MM-DD. Sometimes it's YYYY-MM. Sometimes it's a label like January 2026. Your tracker needs to handle all three or you'll silently drop rows.

If you're importing manually, normalize everything to month-start (2026-01-01) before you paste. If you're using an upload tool, let it handle the format detection.

2. ISRC

The International Standard Recording Code — a unique 12-character ID for every recording. USRC1..., GBABC..., etc.

This is the column you should be matching on. Not track name. Not album. ISRC.

Why ISRC beats track name (more on that below): ISRC doesn't change. Track names get re-mastered, re-tagged, re-spelled, and translated. Your "Sunset Boulevard" might appear in three different reports as "Sunset Boulevard", "Sunset Blvd.", and "Sunset Boulevard (Remastered 2024)". ISRC stays put.

3. Track (or Track Name, Song Title)

You still want this — but as a label, not as a join key. It's what shows up on your statement so you can read it. The actual matching to deals and rates happens via ISRC.

4. Streams

The unit count. This is the volume number that drives everything: per-stream rates, royalty tier escalators, MG progress. Make sure it's a clean integer (no commas, no "k" suffixes).

5. Net Revenue (USD)

The dollar amount Spotify is paying out for those streams, after their cut. (You may also see it labeled Royalty (USD) or Earnings (USD) depending on which report you pull.)

Note: Spotify reports in USD by default for US-based artist accounts, but the column header and currency vary by region. Read the header carefully. If you're a UK or EU artist, you might see Royalty (GBP) or Net Revenue (EUR) — and if your tracker is USD-denominated, you need an FX conversion before the row hits your books.

Why ISRC beats track name (the long version)

Track names are dirty. Three things go wrong:

Punctuation drift. "Don't Stop" vs "Don’t Stop" (different apostrophes). "Sunset Blvd." vs "Sunset Boulevard". Your spreadsheet sees these as different songs. Your DSP sees them as the same. ISRC sees through it.

Re-releases and remasters. A 2024 remaster of a 2018 single is technically a different recording — different ISRC. But the platform might still report streams under the original track name in some cuts of the data. If you're matching on name, you might double-count or under-count.

Translations and regional titles. A track released in Latin America might appear with a Spanish title in regional reports. Same ISRC, different name string.

The rule: match on ISRC, display on track name. Map your ISRCs to deal IDs once, and never re-do it.

The 3 columns that mislead

A few columns look useful but will trip you up:

Country — granular country-level breakdowns are interesting for marketing, but if your deal pays a flat per-stream rate, you don't need them in the calc. They balloon your row count without adding accuracy.
Product Type / Stream Source — Spotify breaks streams into Premium, Free, Discovery Mode, Marquee, etc. If your deal has differentiated rates by stream type, you need this. If not, sum them and move on.
Album / Release — feels like a join key. Isn't. Use ISRC.

Wiring it into your tracker

If you're rolling your own spreadsheet:

Make ISRC your primary key
Use XLOOKUP (or INDEX/MATCH if you're on older Excel) from a Deal_ID lookup table keyed on ISRC
Multiply Streams × your contracted rate per stream
Compare against Net Revenue (USD) from the report — if they differ by more than a few percent, flag the row

If you're using My Royalty Tracker, you don't need to do any of this manually. Drop the CSV into the Upload Center, the parser auto-detects Spotify from the headers, normalizes the dates, and appends the rows to Sales_UsageData keyed on ISRC. The Asset_Map tab handles the ISRC → Deal_ID link, and the Royalty_Calc engine takes it from there.

Five columns. The rest is noise. Now you know which.