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.

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!

After another three months of blood, sweat, and tears (not to mention cursing), NPR Digital Services was able to compile all that data that you stations and shows uploaded to us into the Q2 2011 SoundExchange reports, which were officially delivered last week.

Here are the top line numbers: we generated reports for 316 stations (licensees) and 503 content channels. All told, those reports covered over 830,000 songs which generated 13.6 million music aggregate tuning hours.

That right, is a lot of data. I’ll be digging deeper into the reporting data and sharing more findings in the coming weeks – so stay tuned!

Thanks to all who reported. You can download the final report file(s) that we generated and submitted to SoundExchange on your behalf via Composer Basic or Pro. Simply go to View Reports and click on the Quarter (e.g. Q2 – 2011) in the left hand column (note that there is a separate report for each of your channels).

Now that those reports are done this, of course, means that we’re already working on the next round of reports. We’re now accepting your data for Q3 (July 1 – September 30). The deadline to get us your Q3 data is Friday, October 7, 2011.

As always, I beg, plead and request on bended knee that you don’t wait until the last minute to gather and report your data. Make your life easier by getting it done and off of your mind as soon as possible.

Thanks again and enjoy the rest of the summer!

FINAL REMINDER: The deadline for submitting your Q2 2011 SoundExchange reporting data to NPR Digital Services is this Friday, July 8, 2011.

Anyhoo, with lots of you submitting reporting data right now, it seems like a good time to review the meanings of the various statuses for your quarterly SoundExchange reports in Composer Basic and Pro. These are the statuses you see on the View Reports screen, which you can get to by clicking on View Reports under the SoundExchange Dashboard in the global Composer navigation.

Here’s how they break down:

Incomplete – Means we haven’t received either playlist files and/or streaming logs from you. NOTE: Composer Pro clients will see this status until we export your playlist data from the tool for use in SoundExchange reports. That usually doesn’t happen until after the end of the quarter.

Pending – Means we’ve received both playlists and streaming logs from you, but they haven’t been preprocessed. Before the final reports are generated, files get preprocessed to ensure they match our formatting and have the appropriate data fields. Playlist files get automatically preprocessed shortly after upload; streaming logs, on the other hand, get processed manually by NPR DS staff, and so may take some time before they are preprocessed.

Ready – Means we have both playlists and streaming logs and that they’ve been preprocessed successfully; in other words, based on the data we have from you we can generate a report.

Complete – The final report for SoundExchange has been generated.

Basically, this all means that reporting should work like this:

1. You’re enjoying the time off between reporting deadlines and haven’t uploaded any data to us yet, so your status is Incomplete

2. After some last minute scrambling on deadline day, like most people, you upload your playlists and streaming logs to NPR Digital Services at 4:55pm (ET), causing your report status to change to Pending

3. While you’re enjoying a post-submission adult beverage, NPR DS successfully preprocesses your files, and your status changes to Ready

4. Just before final submission to SoundExchange, NPR DS generates the actual report, and your status changes to Complete

5. Once NPR DS submits all of the most recently completed quarters’ reports to SoundExchange (in one big pile) the new quarter appears in Composer and your status for that report is Incomplete. So continues the viscous cycle.

Make sense? Hopefully it does, but if not, you know what do…

If you’ve already submitted your Q2 2011 SoundExchange reporting data to NPR Digital Services (big thanks!) – which are due on July 8, just two scant weeks from Friday! – or even if you haven’t yet (for shame), now is a good time to review the contact and stream information for your station that was provided to us in the past. People leave stations, new channels are added, formats and schedules are changed, etc. Whenever any of those things happen, we need to know about it for SoundExchange reporting purposes.

So, if you haven’t recently, please do the following as soon as you can, and on a regular basis in the future, such as when you submit your data to us each quarter:

1. Update your station contacts – These are the people responsible for SoundExchange reporting and the ones who should get SoundExchange-related email reminders and updates from us. To review and update the list in Composer Basic or Pro go to Edit Station Info under SoundExchange Dashboard using the What do you want to do? global navigation at the top of each page.
2. Review your station’s existing streams – These are the content channels that your station streams and for which reports need to be generated each quarter. This should be all distinct content streams, regardless of format. To see the list of streams we currently have for you, go to Edit Station Info and scroll to the bottom of the page. where it lists your Station Streams. For each stream, make sure that the Format is correct. If not, click on the Edit link for that stream and update it appropriately.
3. Notify NPR Digital Services and CPB of any new or obsolete streams – If the list of station streams that we have in Composer Basic/Pro for you is incorrect, please contact me to let us know which ones are obsolete or what new channels you’ve added (we have to add or remove streams from your account). For each new stream, please be sure to specify which of the follow formats it is:
   Classical
   Jazz
   Music Mix
   News and Information
   News/Classical
   News/Jazz
   News/Music Mix
   Adult Album Alternative  

   Also, you’ll need to notify the CPB of any new or obsolete streams, using their Internet Music Rights site.

4. Review channel schedules – Be sure to review the schedule grid that we have for each of your streams in Composer Basic/Pro, to ensure that they properly reflect when you streamed syndicated programs that provide NPR Digital Services with playlists for SoundExchange reporting (full list here). To review and update your schedule grid, go to Create/Edit Program Guide under Program Guide Composer in the global navigation. If you have more than one stream you can toggle between the schedule grid for each one using the My Stations drop down selector in the upper right corner of the screen.

Thanks as always and happy summer!