SoundExchange Reporting Blog

During our session on SoundExchange reporting at the PRIMA conference in New Orleans last week, an excellent question was posed: does Public Interactive have any plans to share information that could be gleaned from all of the playlist and stream listenting data that we’re collecting for reporting purposes?

Yes, indeed, a most excellent question!

The short-term answer is we don’t have a plan yet for reporting such information, because we’ve been quite busy just reaching out to stations, gathering data, building our tools like Composer Pro, and generating the quarterly reports. The long-term answer is most definitely yes! We would love to report back information and statistics that would be of interest to the system.

Now that the question has been raised – and now that we’ve gotten our reporting legs under us, a bit – we would like to begin generating and sharing aggregate information based on the data we’ve gathered.

The obvious question, though, is, what do you people want to know?

To that end, we’d like to begin soliciting your input on what type of information based on SoundExchange reporting data should we report back to the system? If you have any ideas or suggestions, please add them as a comment to this post, so all can see what others are interested in. Once we get an idea of what kind of information folks are interested in, we’ll see about generating some reports that answer your questions.

Keep in mind the following parameters:

• We can only share aggregate statistics, meaning we cannot share data for any specific station. Stations, of course, have access to their own SX reports that we generate via Composer Basic or Pro.

• We have two types of data upon which to draw:
  • Playlists (potentially) include the following information for each song streamed:
    • Song Title
    • Featured Artist
    • Album Title
    • Marketing Label
    • Song play frequency/time of each play/Actual Total Performances (number of people that heard a song)
  • Streaming access logs includes information about stream listening, such as time and duration of listener sessions.

• We can also break things down by stream format, which is identified as one of the following:
  • Classical
  • Jazz
  • Music Mix
  • News and Information
  • News/Classical
  • News/Jazz
  • News/Music Mix
  • Adult Album Alternative

So, we can answer – or try to answer – questions like:

What’s the most frequently played piece of music on classical streams?

What song was heard by the most listeners?

What are the peak listening hours for AAA streams?

Etc., and so on.

Think about it, noodle on it, kick it around a bit and let us know what you’d like to learn from all this. Once we get some feedback, we’ll figure out what the popular questions are and do our best to provide some answers both now and going forward.

As we all try and recover from the insanity that was Q3 SoundExchange reporting (well, some of us aren’t done with it yet – so recovery will have to wait), I would like call everybody’s attention to this recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board.

The gist of it is that the CRB has decreed that most digital music services must now do census reporting! That means full-quarter, 24×7 reporting of what music you stream, not sample, 14-days-per-quarter reporting that most stations covered by the CPB-SoundExchange deal must do.

The good news for stations covered by the CPB-SX deal is that this decision does not apply to you and you get to keep doing sample reporting through the end of 2015.

After that, well, we’ll just have to see.

So, see – it could be worse. Like six-times-the-amount-of-work-worse.

A few other things to note:

• The article reiterates the data fields that must be reported for each song streamed: Title, Artist, Album and Label.
• You’ll see mention there also of reporting the number of performances (or actual total performances – ATP) of each song, which is the number of people who actually heard the song. Stations covered by the CPB-SX agreement reporting through Public Interactive don’t have to calculate this number. We do it for you for reporting back to SoundExchange, but in order to do so we need the start and end times of each song play (or the start time and duration), as well as your streaming access logs.
• One statistic not mentioned in the article but that stations also have to calculate and report are total Aggregate Tuning Hours (ATH), for all programming. Stations reporting under the CPB-SX agreement instead report their Music Aggregate Tuning Hours (MATH) – or the ATH for just music programming – which, again, Public Interactive calculates on behalf of stations, using the start and end time of each song play and the streaming access logs.

So, to summarize, if the CPB-SX agreement were not in place (and had the CPB not hired Public Interactive to help with reporting), most public broadcasters would have to:

1. Still collect all of the same data about songs streamed, not just for two weeks a quarter, but for every song streamed, all day, every day.
2. Use the raw data to calculate the required SoundExchange statistics (ATP and ATH), or pay for software or a service that will do these calculations, instead of having PI do it for free.
3. Pay performance royalties to SoundExchange, instead of having the CPB pay the royalties.

Feel better now?

Finally, I draw your attention to the last two sentences in the article:

In recent meetings, SoundExchange has indicated that it is going to emphasize reporting requirements, and potentially take action against webcasters who ignore their obligations.  Don’t become an example.

If you are not doing so already, I urge you to begin complying completely with the reporting requirements.