SoundExchange Reporting Blog

Thanks to the blood, sweat and tears (not to mention the cursing) of lots of people, NPR Digital Services was able to complete and submit the Q4 2011 SoundExchange reports last week.

For those interested in the gory details, the reports covered:

• 327 stations
• 522 content channels
• 19.4 million aggregate tuning hours devoted to music streaming
• 890,000(ish) recordings

Each (featured) performer on every one of those recordings is now eligible to collect royalty money (paid on behalf of your station by the CPB) from SoundExchange. See? We’re helping starving (and some not-so-starving) artists to get paid!

Now that the hangover from the Q4 reports has (just about) cleared, it’s time to face reality and get crackin’ on your reporting data for the Q1 2012 reports. Those data should come from with the period of January 1 through March 31 and must be submitted to to NPR Digital Services by Friday, April 6 2012.

Keep up the great work, everyone!

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope y’all rang in 2012 with family, friends and fun times.

Now that the new year is here, I’m sure everyone is busy making up their list of New Year’s resolutions. If your list is anything like mine,  it looks something like this:

1. Stop eating frosting right from the can
2. Start exercising more (playing Battleship on the Wii doesn’t count)
3. Start making more money (legally)

Yes?

Might i suggest adding one more item to your list: get your quarterly SoundExchange data to us at NPR Digital Services in a timely fashion! To that end, this is your last reminder that, if you haven’t submitted them already, your Q4 2011 reporting data are due here by this Friday, January 6.

Thanks and have a great start to 2012!

I promise! So, here it is:

Friendly reminder (is there any other kind?) that your Q4 2011 SoundExchange data are due to us at NPR Digital Services by Friday January 6, 2012. But don’t wait until the last minute to submit; nothing is worse than compiling playlist data with a raging New Year’s hangover.

But, hey, it’s your head.

Enjoy the rest of the end of year holiday madness and have a great New Year!

I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving. I don’t know about you, but I’m just now starting to not feel full and I no longer smell like gravy.

Moving right along to the next holiday, right about now Santa Claus is reviewing his Naughty and Nice lists to see who’s going to get coal in his or her stocking. The surest way to be on Santa’s Nice List ® is to get your Q4 SoundExchange data submitted to us at NPR Digital Services well before Christmas - and well before the due date of January 6, 2012.

Then you can enjoy your holidays (and eggnog) free of SoundExchange reporting stress! Doesn’t that sound nice? You betcha!

Thanks to those who’ve already submitted their data and I hope everyone (even you last minute types) have a great holiday season.

Happy Halloween!

In the spirit of really scary things, this seems like the perfect day to announce the due date for submitting your Q4 (October 1 through December 31) SoundExchange reporting data to NPR Digital Services. That date is Friday, January 6, 2012.

Did we scare you? Yes? Good.

As always, no need to wait that long to submit your data; please get it to us as soon as you can after your chosen reporting weeks. Make this holiday season more enjoyable by getting your submission to us well before then; there ain’t nothing worse than having to do your SoundExchange reporting with a New Year’s hangover.

In happier news, we’re now able to accept your Q4 data because we finally submitted the Q3 reports to SoundExchange last week. Once again, you guys (as a whole) did a great job! The reports we submitted covered the following:

• 313 stations
• 498 content channels
• 15.8 million aggregate tuning hours devoted to music streaming (a new record!)
• 840,000+ songs

In short that’s a lot of data which will result in lots of artists getting paid. Well done and keep up the good work!

Quick reminder for you folks who like to procrastinate (you know who you are): the deadline to get your Q3 SoundExchange reporting to data us at NPR Digital Services is this Friday, October 7.

Hard to believe another deadline is already upon us, but there it is.

If you’ve already submitted your data but didn’t check in with me to make sure we have what we need, then please do so now!

Thanks to all for your hard work on meeting your reporting obligations.

Thanks to all who attended my session Digital Media Metrics at the Public Radio Programming Conference here in Baltimore today. Also, big thanks to Mike Reszler of APM/MPR for, in actuality, graciously letting me horn in on what was originally his session, so I could present some streaming usage metrics that we’ve gleaned all that there SoundExchange data you guys send us each quarter.

Here, as promised, is my slide deck for your downloading pleasure: SoundExchange Reporting – PRPD 2011

As always, I’m greatly enjoying the PRPD conference and, in particular, meeting many of you in person. I’ll be here for the rest of the conference, often times hanging out at the NPR Digital Services booth, so please introduce yourself if you see me

Just wanted to remind y’all (or, as we said it back in my native and beloved Pittsburgh, yinz) of a couple of important events and items. Namely:

1. I’ll be traveling to Baltimore next week to speak at the annual Public Radio Programming Conference. Be sure to stop by my session or the NPR Digital Services booth and say hello!

2. The deadline for submitting your Q3 SoundExchange data to us is starting to get uncomfortably close (close enough to start raising my blood pressure, at least): it’s a little over three weeks away: Friday, October 7, 2011.

3. Finally, while more and more syndicated shows are submitting playlist data to NPR Digital Services, many still do not. If you stream one that doesn’t, you (unfortunately) are responsible for getting the required data and uploading to us along with your local playlists. If you produce a syndicated show that is not currently sending playlist data to us, then please start!

I hope to see many of you next week in Baltimore!

As I continue digging through the Q2 2011 SoundExchange reporting data in preparation for my talk at the upcoming Public Radio Programming Conference, I thought I ‘d share some findings about the songs reported in this last quarter.

First, though, a definition. When compiling the data you supply to us for your quarterly SoundExchange reports, one of the statistics we calculate for each song you report is the total (or actual) number of performances. That’s not the same as the number of plays or spins; instead, it’s a count of the number of people that heard the song, which we calculate using your streaming access logs.

Anyhow, using that measure, here, then, are the 10 most performed songs (across all channel formats) on station streams covered by the CPB-SoundExchange webcasting agreement in Q2 2011:

1. Gonzaghuinha “Tanacara”
2. Death Cab for Cutie “You are a Tourist”
3. Gomez “Options”
4. Fleet Foxes “Helplessness Blues”
5. TV On the Radio “Will Do”
6. Foster the People “Pumped Up Kicks”
7. Dawes “Time Spent in Los Angeles”
8. Lykke Li “I Follow Rivers”
9. My Morning Jacket “Circuital”
10. Bon Iver “Calgary”

What do think? Any of these songs in your station’s rotation?

Here’s another preview of the information I’ll be sharing at next month’s Public Radio Programming Conference in Baltimore.

Each content channel that we report on to SoundExchange each quarter must be identified as one of the following formats:

• Classical
• Jazz
• Music Mix
• News and Information
• News/Classical
• News/Jazz
• News/Music Mix
• Adult Album Alternative

The recently filed Q2 2011 reports covered 503 content channels streamed by 316 public radio stations and here’s how they break down by format:

So, almost a third of all reporting channels are of the News/Music Mix variety, while only a small (but feisty!) 5% of channels are News/Jazz.

If this sort of information floats your boat, and you’ll be in Baltimore for the conference, be sure to drop by my session on 9/21 for more such goodies!