What Exactly Would You Like to Know?
February 12th, 2010 by Phil JohnsonDuring our session on SoundExchange reporting at the PRIMA conference in New Orleans last week, an excellent question was posed: does Public Interactive have any plans to share information that could be gleaned from all of the playlist and stream listenting data that we’re collecting for reporting purposes?
Yes, indeed, a most excellent question!
The short-term answer is we don’t have a plan yet for reporting such information, because we’ve been quite busy just reaching out to stations, gathering data, building our tools like Composer Pro, and generating the quarterly reports. The long-term answer is most definitely yes! We would love to report back information and statistics that would be of interest to the system.
Now that the question has been raised – and now that we’ve gotten our reporting legs under us, a bit – we would like to begin generating and sharing aggregate information based on the data we’ve gathered.
The obvious question, though, is, what do you people want to know?
To that end, we’d like to begin soliciting your input on what type of information based on SoundExchange reporting data should we report back to the system? If you have any ideas or suggestions, please add them as a comment to this post, so all can see what others are interested in. Once we get an idea of what kind of information folks are interested in, we’ll see about generating some reports that answer your questions.
Keep in mind the following parameters:
- We can only share aggregate statistics, meaning we cannot share data for any specific station. Stations, of course, have access to their own SX reports that we generate via Composer Basic or Pro.
- We have two types of data upon which to draw:
- Playlists (potentially) include the following information for each song streamed:
- Song Title
- Featured Artist
- Album Title
- Marketing Label
- Song play frequency/time of each play/Actual Total Performances (number of people that heard a song)
- Streaming access logs includes information about stream listening, such as time and duration of listener sessions.
- Playlists (potentially) include the following information for each song streamed:
- We can also break things down by stream format, which is identified as one of the following:
- Classical
- Jazz
- Music Mix
- News and Information
- News/Classical
- News/Jazz
- News/Music Mix
- Adult Album Alternative
So, we can answer – or try to answer – questions like:
What’s the most frequently played piece of music on classical streams?
What song was heard by the most listeners?
What are the peak listening hours for AAA streams?
Etc., and so on.
Think about it, noodle on it, kick it around a bit and let us know what you’d like to learn from all this. Once we get some feedback, we’ll figure out what the popular questions are and do our best to provide some answers both now and going forward.
February 18th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
I’d like to know technical details of what software tools you are using to analyze the streaming log files and best practices of measurement (e.g. what is the streaming equivalent industry standard for “visitors” is it requests for stream?). KQED uses Sawmill, it is a leading open source solution, but requires big learning curve, and technical know (e.g. using the right 202 vs 206 filters).
March 10th, 2010 at 7:16 pm
DJs at KVNF would like to know how well Sound Exchange is doing at the task of getting royalty payments to artists. I know that’s not a part of PI’s data, but what’s the gut feeling there? Is this extremely tedious gathering of information actually having the desired result?
Thanks for all your hard work –
Jeff
March 11th, 2010 at 9:58 am
Tim: We’ve created our own tools for log analysis. For SX reporting, the needs are pretty simple (e.g., we don’t have to worry about unique visitors). As we go forward and start to generate other reports based on the data, we may have to move to a more sophisticated tool. If/when we do I’ll be sure to talk about it here. When I was at WGBH we used Sawmill for reporting on streams and downloads. It was a pretty decent tool, as I recall. They may be still be using it; I’m not sure.
Jeff: We’re not in any way involved in the distribution of royalty payments, nor does SX share any such information with us. So, we can’t answer that question. However, there was an interesting article in RAIN recently about this that you may be interested in, Check it out here:
http://textpattern.kurthanson.com/articles/898/rain-33-sx-says-theyve-paid-far-more-to-artists-for-streaming-than-billboard-reports
March 17th, 2010 at 12:29 pm
Jeff, SoundExchange currently has a quarter of a billion dollars in royalties it hasn’t distributed. Last count – for end of 2008 mind you – was $256m. So it’s probably more like $330m they are sitting on right now, as these only come out in their yearly tax documents. See: http://www.p2pnet.net/story/34973
SoundExchange is currently making a big push now how this is the fault of people giving them ‘bad data’ (see: http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/magazine/opinion/e3i6baa5818ddcc27e116717a5001718a1d?src=achallenge) and have played this idea up, a lot, through music media channels like Billboard etc.
What SoundExchange doesn’t answer – and what a lot of people suspect – is that it isn’t the fault of bad data (because honestly, how many stations were paying SE but not submitting logs?) but is instead because artists and performers haven’t opted into the SoundExchange payment process, which is kind of onerous and very ‘block box’ (tax forms and W9′s and the like.)
This recent bad data PR they are doing has a lot to do with their fight to get terrestrial radio to pay a performance fee as well, i.e. the fight they’re having with NAB. If that goes through, SE’s going to be handling a LOT more cash, and it looks bad if they’re only giving out half of the money that’s coming in.
They have recently done some deals with CDBaby, Myspace, etc. to identify and pay artists on their unpaid list, which is a very, very good thing. What people are criticizing them for, though, is that it has taken them until 2010 to realize that myspace/cdbaby/etc even exist and to approach them on this. Meanwhile, back in 2008-2009 they were content to spend millions of dollars on lobbying, PR firms, and DC-area consultants to try and push a performance right through – instead of finding and paying artists. So everything they’re doing now, while good, looks like they’re playing catch-up on stuff that should have happened three years ago.