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 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!

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…

Attention those of you who stream (and report to SoundExchange on) classical music. Consider the following chart that’s based on reporting data from Q1 2011 for stations covered by the CPB-SoundExchange webasting agreement:

Click to enlarge

This chart reflects the most performed artists as reported by the 300+ stations that we generated SoundExchange reports for in Q1 2011. A “performance” is one transmission of a song to a stream listener (not just spins).

So, according to the data we received, The Decemberists were the most performed artists on CPB-covered stations in Q1 (HAPPY NOTE: No sign of Justin Bieber!).

“OK,” you say, “And?” These findings are no real surprise.

Right, but look a little more closely at the chart. Who comes in as the second most performed artist in Q1? That’s right: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Also high on the list are Beethoven and Bach.

Having seen Amadeus many times (great flick!), I know for a fact that Mozart is dead. Long dead. As are, I’m pretty sure, Beethoven and Bach.

Now, I wasn’t a history or music major (I went with economics – big mistake), but I’m pretty sure they all died well before the first ever sound recording was made, which means none of them could possibly be the featured artist on a sound recording, which is who receives the digital performance royalties that SoundExchange collects and distributes.

Plus, even if one of them were still alive, they were all composers, not performers. Composers and songwriters don’t get paid by SoundExchange; performers do!

See the problem now?

When reporting the performance of a classical piece, you MUST MUST MUST report the featured artist/group/orchestra on the recording, NOT the composer.

By not properly reporting the performing artist you are not only not in compliance with the SoundExchange reporting requirements, you are also preventing those artists from getting paid by SoundExchange.

Not good.

SoundExchange themselves just wrote about this issue on their blog.

Please make sure that you are properly reporting artists in the future. Classical musicians have it hard enough; let’s not make it harder by keeping them from getting some of that money that CPB paid to SoundExchange for the music you stream…

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!

I am pleased as punch to announce that Public Interactive has once again completed a not-so-minor miracle by delivering another round of quarterly reports to SoundExchange, this time for Q4 2010.

Thanks to the hard work of many people at stations, syndicated shows, service providers and, of course, right here at Public Interactive, we were able to produce reports for 302 stations covering 482 content channels and 11,447,867 Music Aggregate Tuning Hours (a measure of the total hours of music transmitted to listeners) for the recently competed quarter. It’s truly a ridiculous task that somehow manages to get pulled off each quarter. It’s also an important task, helping to keep stations in compliance with the terms of the CPB-SoundExchange agreement and, hence, the copyright laws.

Now that the Q4 reports are done, that means we’re ready to accept your Q1 2011 reporting data (covering January 1 – March 31). Per usual, I can’t encourage everyone strongly enough to submit your reporting data as soon as possible after your chosen reporting weeks are over. Don’t don’t don’t wait until the last minute, please, I beg you.

For those who still refuse to heed this advice, the deadline for submitting your Q1 data to Public Interactive is Friday, April 8, 2011.

Again, a big thanks to all who submitted Q4 data; keep up the good work!

Finally, if you haven’t already, be sure to opt in for coverage under the latest CPB-SoundExchange agreement!

Another calendar quarter has come and gone, which means that another round of SoundExchange reporting has also come and gone! Last week, after months of hard work by many people – mainly YOU people at the stations -  Public Interactive delivered the Q3 2010 reports to SoundExchange. Here’s the 411 on this round of reports:

• Stations reporting: 290
• Content streams reported on: 459
• Total Music Aggregate Tuning Hours (MATH) covered by the reports: 11,826,951

Once again, you people gave us lots and lots of data! Thanks to all who did.

For those who didn’t and who should, well, you really need to start; by not reporting you are putting your station at risk of being found in violation of copyright laws.

That would be bad. Don’t let it happen to you.

If you haven’t been reporting then there’s no better time to start than with the next round of reports!

Speaking of, the deadline for submitting your SoundExchange reporting data for those Q4 2010 reports (covering October 1 – December 31) is Friday, January 7, 2011.

As always, I urge, beg and plead with all of you to get us your data as soon as your reporting weeks are over. Don’t wait until the reporting deadline! Each quarter there are stations that wait until the last minute to submit their data, only to find their stream host can no longer produce the required streaming logs, or who don’t have enough time to fill in their playlist logs or some such problem which then prevents us from generating a report for that station. The best way to avoid such problems is to submit your data as soon as possible!

No matter when (or how) you submit your data, contact me as soon as you do, so I can verify that we have what we need.

Finally, I’ll be traveling to Las Vegas this week to speak at the Western States Public Radio conference about (what else?) SoundExchange reporting. I’ll speaking at 1:45 on Friday for about 10 minutes, just after lunch. If you’re going, please be sure to sit in on my session and say hello!

OK, enough with the pleading. Thanks again for all the hard work, folks!

Before getting into the main point of this post, allow me to remind all that the deadline for submitting your Q3 SoundExchange reporting data is this Friday, October 8, 2010. Sad, but true.

If you have already submitted data but haven’t checked with me yet, to ensure we have everything we need, please do so now!

If you haven’t yet submitted your Q3 SoundExchange data, then please, also, by all means, do so now!

Enough with the unpleasantries. I’m really writing here to let everyone know that Public Interactive has tweaked the statuses of your SoundExchange reports in Composer Basic and Pro. Previously, they were a bit confusing, so we’ve tried to  make them a little more self-explanatory. Here’s how they work now:

Incomplete – Means we haven’t received either playlist files and/or streaming logs from you.

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 PI 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 to ensure we have enough data to generate a report; in other words, we have data from you and based on that 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 upload your playlists and streaming logs to Public Interactive; your report status goes from Incomplete to Pending

2. PI successfully preprocesses your files, and your status goes from Pending to Ready.

3. Just before final submission to SoundExchange, PI generates the actual reports, and your status goes from Ready to Complete.

There you have it. Hopefully, this is somewhat less confusing than it was. If not, as always, contact me and I’ll try to clear it up…!

Once again, thanks to lots of hard work by lots of folks – in particular YOU fine folks at so many stations – quarterly reports have been generated and delivered by Public Interactive to SoundExchange, this time for Q2 2010! The totals for this quarter’s reports:

Stations reporting: 288, a 9% increase over Q1 2010

Content streams reported on: 431, a 16% increase over Q1

Total Music Aggregate Tuning Hours (MATH) covered by the reports: 11,752,233, a 2.5% increase over Q1

That there is a lot of data, folks. Well done, everyone! Give yourself a pat on the back.

OK, that’s enough celebrating; time to get to work on Q3 2010 reporting! We are now accepting your reporting data for Q3 via Composer Basic and Composer Pro. The due date for data from the current quarter (July 1 – September 30) is Friday, October 8, 2010.

Once again, I urge one and all to get us your data as soon as your reporting weeks are over. Don’t wait until October! The sooner you do it, the more time there is to fix any problems and get us any missing data, and the sooner you will have SoundExchange peace of mind, which, really, is priceless.

Please, no matter what, contact me as soon as you upload your data. Do not just upload and assume all is fine! Check with me, please please pretty please. I really can’t emphasize this enough.

Anyway, thanks so much to all of you who submitted data for Q2. We appreciate it, the CPB appreciates it and the artists whose music you stream no doubt appreciate it.