SoundExchange Reporting Blog

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.