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

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!

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!

Attention fans of metrics and crab cakes: I’ll be speaking at the PRPD‘s upcoming Public Radio Programming Conference in Baltimore. Specifically, I’ll be taking part in the following session:

Digital Media Metrics: Making Sense of it All

In the digital world we can count almost anything, and in many cases the numbers can be overwhelming: page views, visits, visitors, time on site, bounce rates, click paths and the list goes on. So where do you focus? Where do you put energy? This session will look at smart metrics vs. dumb metrics, and it will focus on the most important question: what should you count and why? More than just a primer on digital metrics, this session will help you devise a strategy to move from tracking digital metrics to being a digital analyst. And learn fascinating streaming trends from SoundExchange reporting.

Mike Reszler – Managing Director of Digital Strategies & Content, APM &MPR

Phil Johnson – SoundExchange Reporting Project Manager, NPR Digital Services

This session will be during the first set of breakout sessions, on Wednesday, September 21 at 11:00am (consult the conference schedule for exact location). It should be an interesting and informative session; in addition to all of the great info that Mike will be sharing, I’ll be presenting some streaming metrics based on all that data you’ve generated and submitted for quarterly SoundExchange reporting.

NPR Digital Services will also have a booth at the conference, where I’ll be hanging out between sessions, so be sure to stop by to say hello, ask questions and enjoy our usual stellar offering of free candy! I hope to see many of you there.

While we’re on the topic, don’t forget, the deadline to submit your Q3 2011 SoundExchange data (covering July 1 through September 30) to us at NPR DS is Friday, October 7.

If your station streams either (or both) Concierto or Acoustic Café, your SoundExchange reporting just got easier. Both shows are now uploading playlists to NPR Digital Services, so you don’t need to gather that data yourselves for your quarterly reporting.

Big thanks to the folks at those shows for making everybody’s reporting life easier.

Now, to make sure that we are able to properly integrate the playlists for those shows into your SoundExchange reports, you need to do the following:

Go to Create/Edit Program Guide in Composer Basic or Pro and make sure that your schedule grid properly reflects when you stream these shows.

Also, whether you just added the show to your grid or it was already there, make sure that it is now selected from the list of syndicated programs on the Edit Program page, like so:

Finally, after making changes to your schedule, make sure to click the go live with changes button on the Create/Edit Program Guide screen to make it official.

Reminder: the full list of syndicated shows that provide playlists to NPR Digital Services for SoundExchange reporting is here.

If a syndicated show that you stream is not on this list, then your station is responsible for obtaining and reporting the required playlist data to NPR DS. More details on that here.

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!

Are you feeling stressed, unhappy and overwhelmed by the effort to complete and submit your Q2 2011 SoundExchange reporting data to us at NPR Digital Services (due date THIS FRIDAY, July 8, by the by)? Well, first off, take a deep breath and consider having an adult beverage. Everything will OK… Feel better? Good.

Now, it may be that there are other SoundExchange reporting options available to you.

The fine legal minds at Garvey Schubert Barer have produced an updated version of their chart comparing and contrasting the various SoundExchange royalty rates and terms. It may be that your station qualifies for different payment and reporting terms under one of the many webcasting agreements that have been made with SoundExchange (e.g., college broadcasters, microcasters, etc.) You can download the latest version right here.

NPR Digital Services cannot provide any other information or advice on any of these other reporting agreements. We simply present this chart to be helpful and refer you to your own legal counsel to fully understand all of the options, and associated requirements and responsibilities, that may be available to your station.

Should your station choose to opt-out of coverage under the CPB-SoundExchange agreement, in order to report and/or pay SoundExchange under different terms, please let us know and we’ll tell you what you need to do to opt-out from the CPB deal.

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…