SoundExchange Reporting Blog

Next week I’ll be traveling to beautiful Portland, Oregon for the Western States Public Radio (WSPR) Fall Conference 2009. I’ll be taking part in a session to talk about – what else? – SoundExchange reporting.

It will be similar to the session we had at the PRPD conference in Cleveland last month. I’ll be there to give everyone an update on the Q3 reports we are abut to submit to SoundExchnage, as well as more details on Composer Basic, which we are planning to make available to stations for submitting Q4 data.

The session will be headed up by Melodie Virtue, an attorney well versed on internet music copyright and royalty issues, and will also include Ginny Berson of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. Melodie and I will do brief presentations and then we’ll take any and all questions from those in attendance.

The session will be on Wednesday, November 4, from 1:15 – 2:30pm. I will also be around through the rest of the conference on Thursday, so whether you can make our session or not, be sure to say hello if you see me! I’ll keep folks updated on my activities during the conference on my Twitter account.

I will be joined at the conference by Public Interactive’s Sales and Marketing Manager, Joe Orlando, who will be available to answer any and all question you may have about PI’s product offerings.

We’ll also both be available to talk about the current NFL season, if that’s more to your liking.

As we all try and recover from the insanity that was Q3 SoundExchange reporting (well, some of us aren’t done with it yet – so recovery will have to wait), I would like call everybody’s attention to this recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board.

The gist of it is that the CRB has decreed that most digital music services must now do census reporting! That means full-quarter, 24×7 reporting of what music you stream, not sample, 14-days-per-quarter reporting that most stations covered by the CPB-SoundExchange deal must do.

The good news for stations covered by the CPB-SX deal is that this decision does not apply to you and you get to keep doing sample reporting through the end of 2015.

After that, well, we’ll just have to see.

So, see – it could be worse. Like six-times-the-amount-of-work-worse.

A few other things to note:

• The article reiterates the data fields that must be reported for each song streamed: Title, Artist, Album and Label.
• You’ll see mention there also of reporting the number of performances (or actual total performances – ATP) of each song, which is the number of people who actually heard the song. Stations covered by the CPB-SX agreement reporting through Public Interactive don’t have to calculate this number. We do it for you for reporting back to SoundExchange, but in order to do so we need the start and end times of each song play (or the start time and duration), as well as your streaming access logs.
• One statistic not mentioned in the article but that stations also have to calculate and report are total Aggregate Tuning Hours (ATH), for all programming. Stations reporting under the CPB-SX agreement instead report their Music Aggregate Tuning Hours (MATH) – or the ATH for just music programming – which, again, Public Interactive calculates on behalf of stations, using the start and end time of each song play and the streaming access logs.

So, to summarize, if the CPB-SX agreement were not in place (and had the CPB not hired Public Interactive to help with reporting), most public broadcasters would have to:

1. Still collect all of the same data about songs streamed, not just for two weeks a quarter, but for every song streamed, all day, every day.
2. Use the raw data to calculate the required SoundExchange statistics (ATP and ATH), or pay for software or a service that will do these calculations, instead of having PI do it for free.
3. Pay performance royalties to SoundExchange, instead of having the CPB pay the royalties.

Feel better now?

Finally, I draw your attention to the last two sentences in the article:

In recent meetings, SoundExchange has indicated that it is going to emphasize reporting requirements, and potentially take action against webcasters who ignore their obligations.  Don’t become an example.

If you are not doing so already, I urge you to begin complying completely with the reporting requirements.

Thanks to everyone for working so hard to get us your Q3 SoundExchange reporting data! We know what a big chore it was and appreciate everyone’s efforts to meet the data and formatting requirements by our deadline.

Due to the high volume of data you folks have supplied (bravo!), I am not able to respond to everyone’s submission as quickly as I would like. So, if you submitted data and…

… I told you it was good – then you are all set!

… I asked you to tweak something or supply additional data, please do so as soon as possible so that we can include you in the Q3 reports.

… you have not yet heard back, I will get back to you. We need to review your data submission to ensure that it’s in the proper format. If it is not, I will ask you to reformat it ASAP and we’ll do our best to include you in Q3 reports.

Moving forward, we hope to have everyone using Composer Basic to submit data for Q4 reports to us. Stay tuned…

I just updated our SoundExchange reporting FAQ page with a couple of interesting questions that SoundExchange has answered for us. They may be of interest to some of you as you prepare to get us your Q3 reporting data which – I’m sure you all know by now – are due on Friday, October 16, 2009.

Q: Some of the music we play comes from other countries and has titles written in other languages and alphabets (e.g. Cyrillic). How should we report these?

A: SoundExchange encourages stations to report English translations of foreign titles whenever possible. However, when English translations can not be obtained, report the titles as they are and SoundExchange will deal with the translation.

Q: What should we report as the Album for singles that we stream?

A: SoundExchange encourages stations to report the album from a which single came. In the case where a single was a pre-release or truly had no associated album, report the single title in the Album field.