Customising your Channels, Configurations, Cost Types & Sources ✪

Your Channels, Configurations, Cost Types, Sources and Price Categories form the building blocks of your data. How you populates these lists will decide how you can break down your sales & costs in your analytics and how you can apply custom royalty rates to particular sale or cost types. This is an important step when configuring your Curve client. So if you have royalty rates differing by formats or sources of revenue, you'll need to be sure to include them in this area.

We provide you with a default set of configurations, but you are free to adjust these as you please. The main things to consider are

1. What level of detail is provided in your statements? - The level of detail for your sales lines that you can store on your database will largely depend on the level of detail that is provided to you in your statements. If the sales files you receive from your distributor don't break down the streams in a separate Premium and Ad-Funded configuration, then you will not have enough detail to break your streaming revenue down as such on your own database. In such an instance, you may opt to remove the Premium Stream and Ad-Funded Stream configurations and replace them with one simple configuration named Stream.
2. What level of detail do you require to calculate your royalties? - If you account a different royalty rate to your artists dependent on a variety of formats, then you will need these formats broken down in your configurations. The variables you select here will form the building blocks of the terms in your Contracts.
3. What level of detail do you wish to have for analytical purposes? - Even if you don't need particular configurations for your contract terms, you may still wish to breakdown your sales across a variety of configurations to provide an interesting level of detail in your analytics.

When customising your configurations, make sure the meaning of your configurations cover your needs but  don’t overlap. For example, when you have a configuration for Premium Stream & Ad-Supported Stream, there is little or no benefit in having a third configuration named Stream which is nothing more than a less detailed description of the former two configurations combined. Or there is little benefit in having an additional configuration named Subscription Stream, as subscription streams are just a different way of naming your Premium Streams. If you have revenue coming from a variety of sources that each use different terminology, you are not required to take over this terminology. Instead, you will be able to normalise this data and map it to your preferred configurations via our Mapping Manager when importing your sales data.

And please make sure your configurations are  understandable for your clients. Artists will gain little info from a configuration named FAM4. It’s better use clear names such as Premium Stream or Family Stream.

Below, we give a breakdown of all the possible sales and costs configurations that you can customise, and how they are generally used.

Distribution Channels – This describes the over-arching consumption model: such as Digital, Physical, Merchandise and Licensing.

Configurations – These are the formats such as CD, LP, Download, Stream etc.

Price Categories – These are traditionally used within royalty style deals, to define the price point that something was sold at. But these can be used in other ways too, such as categorising returns.

Sources – Using Sources you can set different rates in your contract terms depending on where the income is generated. ie different rates for digital D2C versus from a retailer. You don't need to create a Source for every store you receive revenue from, you are only required to create those Sources that you wish to account a unique royalty rate for.

Cost Types – When dealing with costs, defining a range of types can help you to understand your business better, & categorise your costs for a clear understanding of what your money is being spent on. These Cost Types will also be used in your contract terms.

You can add new values one by one in the Configurations screen, or use the Import button at the top of the page to add these to your Settings in bulk.