Analysing your Digital Distribution Sales Reports

[GregB]

You can get great insights into how your releases are doing by analysing the data freely available from your Digital Distributor.

 

In my own case, all my releases have been through CD-Baby.  This means sales reports are all-inclusive and are identically structured.  I use Excel to analyse the reports to provide comprehensive listings and graphs.  Apple's Numbers and  Google's Sheets will probably do the same, but I have zero experience with them.

 

As of mid 2022, I have 55 tracks with CD-Baby in the form of 4 albums and 1 single. Dates range from 2004 to current.  Once the latest data is downloaded and added to any existing records, a couple of clicks updates the analyses to show performance of tracks by quantity, platform, country, track name, album, date (e.g. month, quarter, year), etc., etc..  The 'database' on my computer currently has more than 13,000 records (see below), each row representing a consolidated CD-Baby sales report for an individual track.  Total plays currently exceed 620,000.

 

 

Once the raw data is structured in a Table like the above, then it is playtime to show anything you want, e.g. ...

 

 

 

 

The only 'problem' I ever had when starting out was date format inconsistencies.   CD-Baby uses MM/DD/YYYY.  Most other countries (like mine) use DD/MM/YYYY.  But I have a fix which is applied to any new incoming data after being added. 

 

 

I'd be happy to share the basics about how I use, build and analyse reported data. 

If interested, please respond to this post, explaining your data sources, spreadsheet software, and what you want to achieve.  If there is sufficient interest and overlap of topics, I'd be happy to create a tutorial video and/or a Zoom meeting, else I'll post individual responses.