SoundExchange Reporting Blog

This week I’m headed to lovely San Francisco for the annual NFCB Community Radio Conference. It’ll be my first time attending this gathering so I’m excited to meet lots of folks and attend a lot of interesting sessions.

I will also be participating in a panel Music Licensing on Thursday, June 2 from 4:00-5:15pm, which should be very informative and useful for any stations that stream music. Here are the session details:

Music Licensing
Moderator: Janis Lane-Ewart, KFAI, Minneapolis, MN
John Crigler, Garvey Schubert Barer, Washington, D.C.
Phil Johnson, NPR Digital Services, Boston, MA
Alan Korn, Berkeley, CA
Travis Ploeger, SoundExchange, Washington, D.C.
Melodie Virtue, Garvey Schubert Barer, Washington, D.C.
Everything you ever wanted to know about music licensing—for broadcast, for streaming, for podcasting and other digital media.  Who gets paid how much and by whom; reporting requirements and how to meet them; the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and what it means to you.

If you’re going to the conference, you won’t want to miss this chance to learn from, and ask questions of, the experts – not me so much (though I’ll be happy to answer your reporting questions), but a couple of great legal minds with lots of experience in this area AND a real, live SoundExchange representative. Don’t miss it!

Joining me at the conference will also be NPR Digital Services’ Sales and Marketing Manager Joe Orlando, who’ll be available to answer your questions about any and all of our offerings, and Keith Hopper, our Director of Product Strategy, who’ll be taking part in a panel on Content Management Systems on Thursday morning.

Here’s the full NFCB conference agenda.

Even if you don’t attend my session, please say hello if you see me! I’d love to press the flesh and put faces to names (and call letters)…

Looking for something new to like on Facebook? Or for a new Twitter account to follow? Or how about a new YouTube channel to subscribe to? Well, then, how’s about hooking up with our friends at SoundExchange via social media?

That’s right, everybody’s favorite performing rights organization is very active in the social media world. Here are some of the ways that you can interact with them:

• Like them on Facebook; too bad there isn’t an option to love them on FB (you know you want to).
• Follow them on Twitter – but, wait, they also have a dedicated Twitter account for support issues here.
• Subscribe to the YouTube channel, which is where they post lots of interesting and helpful videos including artist testimonials and webinars for artists, labels and service providers.

I would encourage you to check them out on these sites; I find them all very informative and the SoundExchange staff is quite willing to interact, answer questions and generally be helpful, particularly on Twitter.

But if all this social media stuff ain’t your bag, you can always go old school and simply check out their web site and, specifically, their blog, for lots of information as well.

Potentially bad news for those of you who stream music from EMI: they just announced that they’re withdrawing a portion of their catalog from ASCAP for new media licensing.

What does that mean?

It means that if you currently stream music that they’ve pulled out of ASCAP, you will now have to negotiate directly with (and potentially pay royalties directly to) EMI for the rights to keep streaming the music that as been withdrawn.

Ouch.

Of course, these rights, which are for the underlying musical compositions, are separate from the royalties that SoundExchange collects and distributes for performance rights to the sound recording.

David Oxenford has lots more information on this here.

Once again, thanks to lots of hard work by lots of people, a not-so-minor miracle has been worked and the latest batch of  quarterly reports (for Q1 2011) have been delivered to SoundExchange !

This latest round, submitted on Friday afternoon, covered 314 stations, 500(!) distinct content channels,  and 13,352,321 (music) aggregate tuning hours. It was yet another monumental effort of cat herding, data crunching and generally turning water into wine.

A big thanks goes to all who submitted data and to our most excellent tech folks here who crunch all that data to compile the statistics and reports. Well done, all!

For those who don’t already know, you can download your actual report (or reports, as there is a separate report for each channel) we generated and submitted on your behalf directly from Composer Pro or Basic.

• Just log in an go to View Reports under the SoundExchange Dashboard.
• There you’ll see a list of the reporting status for each of your channels for the current and past quarters.
• Scroll down to Q1 2011 (or whatever past quarter with a status of Complete) and click on the quarter in the left hand column; that’s the file that we generate from your data and send to SoundExchange.

Feel to free to download these reports and save for your records. Also, if I may, go ahead and print them out; these reports make for fantastic beach reading! Later this year we’re hoping to release e-reader compatible versions…

Of course, the best part of getting a round of reports done is that it means that it’s time to start all over again, this time for the Q2 2011 reports! Those reports, of course, cover April 1 through June 30 and the deadline for getting your data to us at NPR Digital Services is Friday, July 8, 2011. We are now ready, willing and able to accept your Q2 data.

Thanks again and keep up the great work, everyone!