SoundExchange Reporting Blog

It used to be that two things in life were certain: death and taxes. For those streaming music on the web, add one more thing: quarterly SoundExchange reporting.

To that end, this is a reminder to you public radio stations that have chosen to be covered by the CPB-SoundExchange agreement that we’re a little more than three weeks away from the deadline to get us at Public Interactive your reporting data on music streaming for the third quarter of 2009. That deadline is Friday, October 16, 2009!

A number of stations have already given us their data for processing (thanks!) and many, many more have told me they are working on it. We’re happy to take your data as soon as you have it ready. But October 16 is really – honestly, truly – the latest that we’ll be able to take your data for inclusion in Q3 reports that will be submitted to SoundExchange. We submit all station reports in one big batch to SX, so we cannot grant extensions.

I won’t rehash the basics of registration and reporting here; you can read about those particulars in this post.

Let me use this space to answer a few common questions and highlight some other things to keep in mind:

1. Your chosen 14 day reporting period must indeed be fully contained within Q3 (July 1 – September 30). SoundExchange will not accept reports containing data outside those three months.

2. Composer Basic (which includes the SoundExchange Reporting Dashboard) – which will be used to transfer your data files to us – is not yet ready for public consumption. For now, data transfers will continue to be done via FTP.

3. Your playlist files must be in the proper file format, described here, or we cannot process them and, hence, will not be able to file reports on your station’s behalf.

4. If you submitted files to us for Q2 in a different format you still need to submit Q3 files (and beyond) in the required format! For Q2 we accepted just about whatever data we could get, due to the time constraints, but we are requiring the new format going forward.

In other matters, last week in Cleveland I took part in an excellent panel discussion (with lengthy Q&A) on SoundExchange reporting at the PRPD conference. You can access the presentation slides and handouts here. I’ll be participating in a similar session at the upcoming WSPR conference in Portland, OR on Wednesday November 4. If you’re going to be there, be sure to drop by and introduce yourself.

As always, please feel free to contact me with any questions or when you are ready to send us your data files.

Well, we had a great (at least in my opinion) session earlier today at the PRPD conference here in Cleveland. Big thanks to Arthur Cohen and the PRPD folks for giving us the time, as well as to my fellow panelists John Crigler, Jeff Luchsinger, PI’s own Debra May Hughes and, of course, thanks to all of you attendees who asked a whole lot of great questions. Hopefully, you all found it as informative as I did.

For those who missed it, and for those who were there, you can download the various materials related to the session below:

John Crigler’s slides on music licensing

John’s handout on streaming copyright basics

John’s most excellent chart comparing the various SoundExchange agreements

My slides on SX reporting through PI

My handout on SX reporting for Q3

Thanks again to all who participated! Cleveland really does rock!

This coming Friday, September 4, is not only the beginning of Labor Day weekend, but it also marks six weeks until the deadline to get your Q3 SoundExchange reporting data to Public Interactive – Friday, October 16, 2009.

It really sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? Kind of like old age.

Of course, we’ll be happy to take your reporting data before then, if you have it ready. Thanks to those stations that have already delivered their Q3 data to us!

As a reminder, here are the particulars about SoundExchange reporting through PI:

1. Make sure you have registered with the CPB, accepted the terms of the CPB-SX agreement, and registered with PI for SoundExchange reporting. If you have not completed all of these steps then PI cannot submit reports to SoundExchange on your behalf. If you are not sure whether your station has completed all of these steps, contact me and I can tell you.

2. Unless you have already been told otherwise, you choose two 7-day-consecutive periods within the current calendar quarter (July, August, September) on which to report. SoundExchange would like data for two weeks during which you play music that is representative of what you play during the whole quarter.

3. Prepare a data file of the songs you streamed during the reporting period (one file per content stream) that conforms to our playlist log file guidelines. Your playlist file(s) must conform to these basic requirements or we cannot process them and hence cannot generate and submit reports on your station’s behalf to SoundExchange! (NOTE: Existing PI Composer clients don’t need to send us a playlist log file, since we have access to your Composer data; just make sure you’ve filled out the playlist and guide data for your reporting weeks.)

4. Contact your IT department or stream host and request the raw streaming access logs that cover your chosen reporting weeks. Read more here about our streaming access log file guidelines, which describes what data we need. (NOTE: Existing PI streaming clients don’t need to send us streaming log access files.)

5. Once you are ready to send us your data files, if you do not already have an FTP account from PI, contact me and I will give you one to transfer the files to us.

6. Open a bottle of champagne to celebrate! You deserve it.

For those wondering, Composer Basic – an online tool that stations will use to manage stream information, push data files to PI and input schedule data (for use in incorporating syndicated programming playlists) – is not yet ready for prime time, so data uploads will continue to be via FTP. We’re hoping to have this tool online and available for stations before the end of the quarter.

Finally, for those going to the Public Radio Program Directors conference in a couple of weeks, please note that we will be having a session on SoundExchange reporting. If you’re going to be there be sure to attend and stop by the Public Interactive booth to say hello and ask questions.

Last week a number of us from Public Interactive, NPR and the CPB were interviewed by Karen Everhart of Current about the CPB-SoundExchange agreement and some of the issues this has raised with stations. The resulting article that Karen wrote was published this week and is pretty good. I encourage you to read it, if you haven’t already.

Karen did a good job of getting the facts straight; I only noticed one error in the article. The following comment is not right:

Under the current contract, some 270 stations, or 60 percent of the 450 that are eligible, are required to begin reporting this year.

The agreement is actually to report on 60% of music ATH in the system by the end of 2009 (and 80% by the end of 2010), not 60% of the covered entities. Just for the record, your honor.

I am pleased to announce that our friends at the Public Radio Program Directors Association (this means you Arthur!) have given us a slot at their upcoming conference in Cleveland to discuss – what else? – SoundExchange reporting! The SX session at the PRPD conference will be on Wednesday, September 16th at 11:00am. Here’s the skinny on the session:

Eliminate SoundExchange Stress with Dr. Phil and Friends

Are you suffering from online music reporting stress? Join this roundtable discussion on music rights and SoundExchange (SX) reporting for public broadcasters. Phil Johnson (aka:  Dr. Phil) will give a brief report card on how the system is doing, review reporting requirements, provide an exclusive first look at reporting tools coming to your station, and will reveal what you need to know about the upcoming Q3 deadline.  Panelists will provide history and details behind the agreement and a primer on internet music rights and royalties. After a brief presentation we will open the session to answer your questions on the complicated and evolving world of music rights and responsibilities in the realm of new media. Don’t miss this chance to alleviate reporting stress and ask questions about what is and is not permitted forstreaming.

In addition to myself (yes, Dr. Phil), the panelists will include my boss Debra May Hughes, who runs PI, as well as Jeff Luchsinger from the CPB, and John Crigler from the law firm of Garvey Schubert Barer. Both Jeff and John were involved in crafting of the deal between the CPB and SoundExchange. As the session blurb says, we’ll use the time to give you an update on SoundExchange reporting through Public Interactive, including the development of tools to help stations get us their data. Jeff and John will be able to help answer your larger questions on the CPB-SX agreement and music rights and licensing in the digital era.

Let me use this opportunity to refer you back to an excellent webinar about music licensing that John participated in last month for NFCB stations. If you haven’t already watched the video of the webinar, I would encourage you to do so when you have a spare hour. It’s worth your time.

I look forward to meeting many of you in person at the conference. Even if you can’t make the session, please be sure to swing by the Public Interactive booth on Wednesday afternoon and say hello! I’ll only be there on Wednesday, but our crack sales manager Joe Orlando will be there all week to answer any question you may have about PI’s products and services.

I expect that Cleveland will be rocking that week!

Last week the CPB announced that it has reached an agreement with SoundExchange to cover music streaming by public broadcasters through 2015. Recall that the agreement reached earlier this year covered the period January 1, 2005 through December 31, 2010. The new agreement runs from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2015.

The new agreement is similar to the existing one, and contains the same basic parameters:

1. The CPB covers all royalty payments for all covered stations for the period of the agreement.

2. Stations must continue to report quarterly (through Public Interactive) on the music they stream and the number of people that heard it. The vast majority of stations will continue to do only sample reporting (i.e. reporting on two weeks out of each quarter). Currently, only the top 20% of streamers have to do full-census reporting; starting in 2010 (under the current agreement and continuing through the next agreement) the top 30% of streaming music stations will need to do full census reporting. Public Interactive will stations know if they fall into the top 30% of music streamers.

3. Stations are still responsible for abiding by the terms of the Performance Complement of the DMCA.

This is good news for everyone. Honest.

Below is an official mailing on the agreement sent out last week.

Feel free to contact me with questions.

To:       Public Radio System Leaders
From:   Bruce Theriault, Senior Vice President, Radio, CPB;  Jeff Luchsinger, Director, Radio System Investment, CPB
Date:   August 6, 2009
Subject: New CPB-SoundExchange Agreement 2011 – 2015

Dear Colleagues;

We are pleased to announce that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting(CPB) has reached an agreement with SoundExchange (SX) that defines the terms, conditions, and costs for public broadcasters to provide (music) sound recordings over the Internet for the period Jan. 1, 2011 through December 31, 2015.

As you will remember, CPB and a team including NPR and the Station Resource Group came to an agreement with SX in January of this year for the period 2004 – 2010. The new agreement was reached under the Small Webcasters Settlement Act, which was recently amended by Congress and signed by the President to permit the execution of agreements under the Act until midnight, July 30, 2009. The new agreement continues to recognize public radio’s special public service mission and non-commercial nature. It also maintains public radio’s commitment that artists and labels featured on public radio station websites receive the compensation to which they are entitled.

CPB will make annual payments to SX over the term of the new agreement to cover qualified public radio stations (CPB qualified, NPR member and NFCB member stations) and NPR, PRI, APM, and PRX. The type and format of the reports that public radio stations must provide to take advantage of the new CPB-SX blanket agreement are essentially unchanged from those described in the current agreement. To secure the benefits of these agreements most stations will have an obligation to provide quarterly data on usage of their Internet streams and accurate playlists of sound recordings played on their websites. A sub-set of stations will be required to provide census reporting. These reports supply SX with the information necessary to make payments to artists and labels.

Earlier this year CPB selected NPR/Public Interactive (NPR/PI) as the sole agent to collect and report public radio music streaming activities to SX and to assist stations in complying with the reporting requirements. PI has been moving quickly to get stations up to speed and provided the first quarterly reports to SX last month. The deadline for the next set of quarterly reports is October, 16, 2009.

I gave another webinar on SoundExchange reporting under the CPB-SX agreement this past Monday to the Public Radio Program Directors Association (PRPD). It was the best attended webinar yet (80+ people) and lots of questions were asked and (hopefully) answered. Thanks to Arthur Cohen for setting it up, MCing it and also recording the event.

Here are my slides from the presentation.

You can downloaded the video of the recording right here (Windows Media file).

I also did another webinar for NPR stations yesterday, the third of three. Here are the slides from that webinar, which are almost identical to those used for PRPD. That webinar, unfortunately, was not recorded.

I’ll be doing one more of these introductory webinars (whew!) for IMA member stations next Tuesday, 7/28, at 3:00pm ET – then that’s it!

Last Friday an excellent webinar was hosted by our friends at the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB), for whom I gave a webinar on SoundExchange reporting at the end of June. Last Friday’s webinar was organized to answer to lingering legal questions about what can and can’t be streamed under the SoundExchange license, and also on what needs to be reported to SoundExchange via Public Interactive. The panelists were John Crigler and Melodie Virtue, two lawyers who were involved in crafting the agreement between the CPB and SoundExchange.

John and Melodie provided some excellent information on some of the legal issues around streaming music, and more details on the agreement between the CPB and SX. They were able to provide a lot of information that I can’t, not being a lawyer. It is recommended viewing for all stations. Pass the word.

You can download the entire video of the webinar here (Windows Media format).

It’s worth time to check it out.

Earlier this week we closed the books on accepting Q2 data for SoundExchange reports from stations and compiled the reports for delivery. Technically, we’re still dotting a few i’s and crossing some t’s before final FINAL report delivery, but you get the idea.

Thanks to all the stations we gave us data – or made an attempt to get us data – in a very short amount of time, under very foggy circumstances. Some of you really helped us to blaze some trails along the way that will help other stations on down the line. You know who you are. Thanks especially to everyone for their patience as we (and I) figure out how this process will work. It will get smoother for all involved going forward, that much I promise.

Now that Q2 reports are (almost) done and delivered, that, of course, means that we’re already planning for Q3 reports! While the reports will be due to SoundExchange in late October, we will be looking to get data from all stations covered by the CPB-SX agreement as soon as they are ready to give it to us. Recall that almost all stations can choose two 7-day-consecutive periods within the quarter to report on (stations that need to report on the whole quarter already know who they are). So if your station feels that two weeks in July are representative of the music you play all during the months of July, August and September, then you can get us your data early and be done with it!

In any case, we will soon announce a specific (and hard) deadline for getting us Q3 data for inclusion in the reports delivered to SoundExchange.

We are working now on an online tool (Comnposer Basic) and process for stations to use to give us guide/schedule data, and to push playlist and streaming log files to us. Once that tool is ready for general use I will announce it here. If, in the meantime, you are ready to give us your Q3 data, contact me and we will work out a method for data delivery.

I recently posted a couple of pages outlining the formatting guidelines for both playlist and raw streaming access log files. These will probably change somewhat over time (we may go to a single, required file format for playlist logs, but that is still TBD), but for now follow these guidelines when preparing your data files for upload to us.

Finally, as I mentioned above and before, in order to be covered by the CPB-SoundExchange agreement you must register with the CPB, accept the terms of the CPB-SX agreement and then register with us. If you do not do this, you are not covered and we cannot generate and submit reports to SoundExchange on your behalf, even if you give us data!

As a reminder (from our FAQ page), here’s how all that registration works:

Q: How do I register my station for Internet Music Rights Coverage?

A: Follow this link on the CPB website to register.

Once you’ve registered with the CPB you will receive an email from them with a login to a web site to review and accept the terms of the SPB-SX agreement. You must accept the agreement in order to be a covered entity! PI can not submit reports on your behalf to SX until your station accepts the agreement!

I’ve registered on the CPB website and accepted the agreement. Now what?

Sign up with Public Interactive using this form.

In order to get started, we’ll need to gather some information about you and verify that you’ve registered with CPB. The PI Sound Exchange Project Manager will contact you directly to ask for data samples.

There you have it! Isn’t this fun?

Public Interactive and the CPB recently met with SoundExchange to clarify a few outstanding and quite frequently asked questions about SoundExchange reporting. A number of these were related to reporting on classical music. Here are some answers:

Q: Classical recordings often don’t have album titles. What should we report in those cases?

A: Report whatever title is on the physical CD or album from which it came (i.e. what’s on the spine). Whatever it says there is what is to be reported.

Q: How are we supposed to report song titles for classical pieces? Is a Beethoven symphony 4 tracks or 1?

A: However the label divides up the album tracks, that’s what to go on. So, if they split a Beethoven symphony into four tracks, each one is to be reported as a separate song title.

Q: What does “artist” mean for a classical performance? Is this the composer?

A: For classical music the Featured Artist/Group/Orchestra should be the soloist, orchestra or conductor that is featured prominently on the album.

In addition, many stations still have questions about the specific data that Public Interactive needs to collect in order to generate SoundExchange compliant reports. Here are a couple of the most popular and my answers:

Q: What pieces of information about songs do we need to track and report to Public Interactive for SoundExchange reporting?

A: For each song played on each stream, please provide the following data:

1. Song title
2. Featured artist/group/orchestra
3. Album title
4. Marketing label
5. Start date and time of song play
6. End date and time of play or duration of song

Q: Why does Public Interactive need to know the start times and end times or duration of each song?

A: Start and end times/duration are needed to calculate (1) the number of people who heard a given song (in order to match song play time with stream access during that time from your streaming logs) and (2) your station’s music Aggregate Tuning Hours (music ATH), which is the total hours of music streamed times the number of people listening at the time music was played.

Q: What type of data should be included in raw streaming logs?

A: Usually stations don’t have control over what is logged by their streaming server. In general, most streaming server applications (e.g. Shoutcast, Icecast) log similar information. Basically, in order to create SX-compliant reports Public Interactive needs raw streaming access logs that capture the following information:

1. IP Address of requester (for filtering our requests from outside the United States)
2. URL requested
3. Status of request
4. Start date and time of request
5. End date and time or duration or request

Q: Why does Public Interactive need to know the IP address of users accessing our streams?

A: SoundExchange pays royalties based on music streamed to listeners in the United States. They have asked us to filter out requests from users outside of the country. In order to do this (as best as possible) PI needs to know the user’s IP address.

I have updated the FAQ page on this site to include all of these new questions and answers.

Please keep those questions coming!