SoundExchange Reporting Blog

Thanks to all who attended my session Digital Media Metrics at the Public Radio Programming Conference here in Baltimore today. Also, big thanks to Mike Reszler of APM/MPR for, in actuality, graciously letting me horn in on what was originally his session, so I could present some streaming usage metrics that we’ve gleaned all that there SoundExchange data you guys send us each quarter.

Here, as promised, is my slide deck for your downloading pleasure: SoundExchange Reporting – PRPD 2011

As always, I’m greatly enjoying the PRPD conference and, in particular, meeting many of you in person. I’ll be here for the rest of the conference, often times hanging out at the NPR Digital Services booth, so please introduce yourself if you see me

As I continue digging through the Q2 2011 SoundExchange reporting data in preparation for my talk at the upcoming Public Radio Programming Conference, I thought I ‘d share some findings about the songs reported in this last quarter.

First, though, a definition. When compiling the data you supply to us for your quarterly SoundExchange reports, one of the statistics we calculate for each song you report is the total (or actual) number of performances. That’s not the same as the number of plays or spins; instead, it’s a count of the number of people that heard the song, which we calculate using your streaming access logs.

Anyhow, using that measure, here, then, are the 10 most performed songs (across all channel formats) on station streams covered by the CPB-SoundExchange webcasting agreement in Q2 2011:

1. Gonzaghuinha “Tanacara”
2. Death Cab for Cutie “You are a Tourist”
3. Gomez “Options”
4. Fleet Foxes “Helplessness Blues”
5. TV On the Radio “Will Do”
6. Foster the People “Pumped Up Kicks”
7. Dawes “Time Spent in Los Angeles”
8. Lykke Li “I Follow Rivers”
9. My Morning Jacket “Circuital”
10. Bon Iver “Calgary”

What do think? Any of these songs in your station’s rotation?

Here’s another preview of the information I’ll be sharing at next month’s Public Radio Programming Conference in Baltimore.

Each content channel that we report on to SoundExchange each quarter must be identified as one of the following formats:

• Classical
• Jazz
• Music Mix
• News and Information
• News/Classical
• News/Jazz
• News/Music Mix
• Adult Album Alternative

The recently filed Q2 2011 reports covered 503 content channels streamed by 316 public radio stations and here’s how they break down by format:

So, almost a third of all reporting channels are of the News/Music Mix variety, while only a small (but feisty!) 5% of channels are News/Jazz.

If this sort of information floats your boat, and you’ll be in Baltimore for the conference, be sure to drop by my session on 9/21 for more such goodies!

Now that the Q2 SoundExchange reports have been submitted (and since Q3 data collection won’t heat up for a while yet), I’m spending some time looking at what else the reporting data can tell us about our online audiences. I’ll be digging into the data for the next couple of weeks (around taking the family on summer vacation!) and will be presenting a number of findings at the upcoming Public Radio Program Directors conference in Baltimore. I’ll be participating in a session on digital media metrics led by Mike Reszler of American Public Media.

To whet your appetite, here’s a chart showing the percent of public radio’s online audience that comes from outside the United States for the past year:

These numbers are based on the reporting data supplied to NPR Digital Services by stations that are covered by the CPB-SoundExchange webcasting agreement. An international session is defined as any stream request that comes from an IP address outside the United States. These numbers include all sessions, regardless of duration or start time (e.g. includes overnights, weekends etc.).

As you can see, the percentage of online audience outside the US has hovered around 20% pretty consistently for the past year.

I’ll be sharing more information like this in Baltimore and on this here blog, so stayed tuned!

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!

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…

I wanted to highlight some findings that I recently presented at the AMPPR Public Radio Music Conference which we dug up in all that Q4 2010 SoundExchange data that you guys sent to us.

As you all know well, we collect lots and lots and lots of data on the music you pubcasters stream each quarter for these SoundExchange reports which you all love so much. As part of the report generation process, we use those data to count how many people heard each of the songs you played on your streams.

Each time a listener hears a song on your stream, that’s counted as a performance of the song (and this is the stat that SoundExchange uses to distribute royalties to the performers on the recordings and the record labels). Technically, SoundExchange calls the number of times a song was heard the Actual Total Performances, or ATP, of the song.

Since we had that all calculated, I thought it’d be interesting to see which songs were the most performed in Q4 2010, based on your data submissions. Here, then, were the top five most performed songs of Q4 2010, grouped by the format of the channel/stream on which it was played (excluding News & Information channels):

Couple of important notes here:

1. This is for the period October 1- December 31, 2010
2. This is based on data for 302 public stations and 482 distinct content channels for which reports were generated in Q4 2010
3. ATP is adjusted to a monthly average for each song over the quarter, since most stations reported on 14 days per quarter, while some reported on the entire quarter
4. This is based on music streaming audience only, not broadcast

Finally, while I was at it, I figured, what the heck, let’s see if public radio was suffering from the same awful affliction that my 11 year-old daughter currently is, namely, Bieber Fever. Let’s take a look…

Whew! I say that’s one more very good reason to keep funding public broadcasting, in my hunmble opinion.

If you find this sort of thing interesting, or have questions of your own that we could try to answer using these data, please let me know and we’ll do our best to find the answer.