SoundExchange Reporting Blog

Apparently there’s some confusion among a few stations regarding when they must begin reporting to SoundExchange (SX). Some stations are under the impression that reporting isn’t required until 2011. This is most definitely not true; any stations streaming copyrighted sound recordings on-line must report to SoundExchange now. Failure to do so puts your station at risk of being found in violation of copyright law.

This applies to all stations which are under the CPB-SX agreement. CPB is paying the royalties but your station must file the reports. Stations covered by the CPB agreement have the benefit of not paying royalties, but they must report now.  The rules and laws about royalty payments and reporting of musical performances over the Internet have been in place since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into law in 1998. Many stations were apparently either not aware of these obligations or chose to ignore them. While the announcement last year of the agreement between the CPB and SoundExchange may have brought these obligations to light for some stations, they did not delay the requirement to begin providing reports.

The bottom line is, if your station is not already providing reports for SoundExchange, it should begin doing so immediately. Each quarter, Public Interactive (PI) sends SoundExchange a list of all stations that have opted to be covered under the CPB-SX agreement, along with the data from those who have reported. As you might imagine, it would be fairly easy for SoundExchange to figure out which stations are not reporting. And stations which aren’t reporting could be in violation of copyright law. CPB selected Public Interactive to help stations comply with the reporting requirements in order to avoid any such repercussions. PI is not involved in the disbursement of payments to artists or in deciding whether stations are, or are not, in compliance. We have tools and recommendations to make reporting easier.

So, if you’re not already reporting, don’t wait any longer! Please contact us today to get started.

This week there was a small, but not insignificant, bit of news for you classical music folks: NPR has secured an agreement from Naxos, one of the world’s largest classical music labels, to waive the performance complement of the DMCA. This waiver applies to all public radio stations covered by the CPB-SoundExchange agreement and eliminates the need to abide by the performance complement for any classical music whose rights are held by Naxos.

So – good news! Couple of things to bear in mind here:

1. This does not affect the reporting of classical music to SoundExchange via Public Interactive; that is, the same reporting rules continue to apply (e.g. report each track separately, include album titles, etc.).

2. This only applies to stations covered by the CPB-SoundExchange agreement. If your station has not explicitly opted-in to be covered by the deal, then the waiver does not apply to you.

3. The waiver only applies to the playing of recordings owned by Naxos.

NPR views this as, hopefully, the beginning of a process of approaching other labels as well. Let’s all cross our fingers. It’s the little things…

Slowly but surely, Q2 2010 SoundExchange reporting data is starting to dribble in to us here at Public Interactive. Thanks to you early birds for getting us your data already!

For the rest of you, please please PLEASE don’t wait until the deadline to get us your Q2 data. I encourage you to submit your reporting data as soon as your reporting weeks are over! If you wait until the last minute, problems can arise (not to mention other important business like, say, pledge drives). The earlier you get us your data, the more time we have to work together to fix any data problems and ensure that PI can generate and submit reports on your station’s behalf.

Q2 2010 SoundExchange Reporting Steps:

1. Choose your 14-day reporting period, which must be two 7-day-consecutive periods completely contained between  April 1 – June 30
2. Create properly formatted playlist logs and obtain streaming access logs from your stream host for your chosen reporting period
3. Submit playlist and streaming log files to Public Interactive using Composer Basic or Composer Pro
4. Update/enter the guide (schedule) information for each of your content streams in Composer Basic or Composer Pro, so that we can integrate playlists for those syndicated shows that you stream
5. Specify the start dates of your two chosen reporting weeks using Composer Basic/Pro
6. Contact me to let me know you’ve uploaded your data, updated your guide(s) and specified your reporting dates
7. Complete all of these steps by Friday, July 9, 2010
8. Rinse, lather, repeat in Q3…

Of course, there are some exceptions to the above. For example, some stations (they know who they are) must report for the entire quarter. Also, Composer Pro clients that enter playlist data using that tool don’t need to upload playlist files, and PI streaming clients don’t need to upload streaming logs, etc. But, otherwise, them’s the rules.

Oh yes, if you produce a syndicated program and are not yet providing us with playlists, please review this page on what data we need from you, then contact me so we can start collecting your show’s data.

Last week Public Interactive officially generated and submitted Q1 2010 reports to SoundExchange on behalf of 265 stations. The reports covered 373 content streams and 11.5 million Music Aggregate Tuning Hours, a nice increase from the Q4 2009 reports. Big thanks to all of you who submitted data for Q1!

Of course, there are still a number of you who didn’t submit data for Q1, and so are not in compliance with the terms of the CPB-SoundExchange agreement. If you have not been reporting, there’s no better time than the present to get in compliance before the stream police come a-knockin’. You’ve been warned.

Anyway, time now to get cracking on Q2 reports, which cover data from April 1 through June 30. The official deadline to get us your Q2 2010 reporting data will be Friday July 9, 2010.

If you have questions about how this all works, what data you need to give us and such, then please review this page on the basics of SoundExchange reporting through Public Interactive.

A few reminders for this next round of reporting:

1. Your chosen reporting weeks must be fully contained within Q2, (April 1 – June 30).

2. In addition to playlist and streaming log data, please be sure to fill out or update the guide for each of your content streams in Composer Basic or Pro so that we may integrate playlists for syndicated shows that you stream. The full list of syndicated shows for which we’re gathering playlists (which continues to grow) is here. If you produce a syndicated program and are not yet providing us with playlists, please review this page on what data we need from you and how to get it to us.

3. When submitting data to us, make sure to specify the start dates of your two chosen reporting weeks using Composer Basic/Pro (unless you are one of the lucky few that have to do full quarter reporting).

Oh yeah, and one more thing: AFTER SUBMITTING YOUR DATA PLEASE CONTACT ME to let me know that you have and to double check that we have what we need!!!!! We’re still tweaking the reporting system on our end to ensure no data falls through the cracks, but there are still some holes. Don’t assume that no news is good news!

Onward!

Last Friday, Public Interactive‘s own Joe Orlando led a session on SoundExchange reporting at the 2010 AMPPR conference in New York City. I would have been there to lead the session myself, but the timing was bad, since we were very busy dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on the Q1 2010 SoundExchange reports, which we will be delivering this week.

So, since I was too busy harassing as many of you folks as possible about giving us Q1 data a the last minute, Joe took his whip and a chair to NYC and entered the lion’s den on my behalf. Not surprisingly, by all accounts Joe did a great job and the session was well attended. Thanks, Joe!

You can access his session slides here.

Next week I’ll post Q1 report wrap-up and try to kick start Q2 reporting.Thanks to all who provided (or tried to provide) Q1 data.

It never ends…

OK, folks, the current calendar quarter ends in a couple of days, so you know what that means: we are once again about to hit another SoundExchange reporting deadline. This one is for Q1 2010 (January 1 – March 31) and those data are due to us by Friday, April 9, 2010.

If you have already submitted Q1 data to us, and you’ve checked with me and I’ve told you it looks good – then THANK YOU. You are the wind beneath my wings and you should be sleeping soundly!

If you have submitted data to us but have not confirmed with me that we have what we need, you should do so ASAP, so that you, too, can sleep soundly.

If you have not yet submitted your reporting data to us for Q1, you must do so by the data submission deadline to ensure that we can generate reports on your behalf.

The basics on the SoundExchange reporting through Public Interactive are available here.

As always and ever, contact me with any questions.

Charles Dickens wrote that line 150 years ago in reference to the time before and during the French Revolution, yet it could still apply today. To wit…

The best of times: spring will, uh, spring this weekend!

The worst of times: Q1 2010 SoundExchange reporting data are due to Public Interactive in a just a couple of weeks. Well, three weeks from this Friday, to be exact. That due date is Friday, April 9, 2010.

Rather than rehash all the particulars again, allow me to simply link to my previous post which lays it all out.

Just because the deadline is still three weeks away is no reason to wait to get us your data! The earlier you get it to us, the more time we have to identify issues with your data and the more time you have to resolve them and make any revisions. If you submit data at the last minute you run the risk of not having the time to make any fixes and, thus, not being included in the reports we submit.

Thanks to all who already provided their Q1 data to us. We love you early birds!

Wow – it seems like we just finished up gathering data for the Q4 2009 SoundExchange reports. But don’t look now, because just five weeks from this Friday – that’s Friday, April 9, 2010 – is the deadline to get Public Interactive your Q1 2010 SoundExchange reporting data!

Here, again, are the basics, which hopefully folks are getting familiar with:

1. All reporting data must come from within Q1 2010, that is between the dates of January 1 – March 31, 2010.

2. Playlist log files that meet our formatting requirements are required from all stations that are not PI Composer Pro clients. Also, streaming log files are required from all stations that do not host their streams through Public Interactive.

3. Any data files that need to be provided to PI should be uploaded to us using Composer Pro or Basic. To do that, go to Upload Playlists/Streaming Logs under SoundExchange Dashboard in the global navigation.

4. Every station that doesn’t report on the full quarter must specify the start dates of their two chosen reporting weeks using the SoundExchange Dashboard in Composer Pro/Basic. To do that go to View Reports under SoundExchange Dashboard in the global navigation then click on Edit Report Dates for Q1 for each of your streams. Then uncheck the Disregard dates and use full quarter instead check box and use the date drop downs to specify the two starting dates of your chosen reporting weeks.

5. If your station streams Classical 24 you must enter or update the guide information in Composer Pro/Basic for each stream to properly reflect when you streamed C24 during your reporting period, so that we can integrate those playlists into your reports. To do that go to Create/Edit Program Guide under Program Guide Composer in the global navigation. NOTE: When adding the Classical 24 program in your guide, be sure to set the Program Format to Classical: C24.

If you have already uploaded files to us and have not yet confirmed with me that we got them and they are in the correct format LET ME KNOW! Call or email me and I will verify whether we received your files and if the formatting is correct.

If you are not a Composer Pro client of ours and do not yet have your Composer Basic login, let me know and I will give that to you.

Finally, not many folks have weighed in on what they might like to learn from all this data that we’re collecting for SoundExchange reporting. We’d like to be able to give back and share information with the system, but we need your input! Take a look at this post and add your ideas as a comment.

Onward!

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.

After several weeks of drowning in data files, crunching untold numbers and consuming enough coffee to raise the GNP of Colombia a few points, we have officially generated and delivered reports to SoundExchange for Q4 2009! Thanks to all who got us data – or at least tried to. Thanks to your efforts we were able to report on 227 stations covering 300 streams, a roughly 30% percent increase in both over the Q3 SX reports!

If you didn’t deliver your Q4 data to us, but do have it – hold on to it! We currently don’t have a procedure for submitting reports after the delivery date. We may at some point be able to accept it and generate reports after the fact, but for now just keep it in a safe place in case PI – or SoundExchange – asks for it.

As good as the response was for Q4, there are still lots of you stations that haven’t reported. Please please please plan to start doing so for Q1 2010. If you don’t start complying, bad things will happen. I’m not sure what those things are or when they will commence but yes, indeed, they will, sooner or later.

On our end, we’re already planning on starting work for the next round of reports by making the SoundExchange Dashboard component of Composer Basic/Pro more user friendly, and by finally starting to collect data from syndicated shows, starting with the biggies (NPR, PRI, APM music shows). Be sure to keep checking back here for information on that end of things.

On a different note, next week I will be attending the PRIMA conference in New Orleans (Who Dat?), and will be leading a session on – what else? – SoundExchange reporting. That session will be at 9:00am on Friday, and will include Mike Riksen, NPR’s VP of Policy and Representation. If you’re attending, be sure to load up on coffee and beignets beforehand and bring your SX reporting questions!

Finally, for those wondering, the deadline to get us your reporting data for Q1 2010 (covering January 1 – March 31) will be Friday, April 9, 2010. Of course, you don’t need to wait until the last minute to give us your data. I encourage everyone to get us your data as soon as your reporting weeks are over!!! The sooner you get it to us, the sooner we can validate that you gave us what we need, fix any problems and generally get it out of the way.

As a reminder, data should now be submitted to us using either Composer Pro or Composer Basic (well, vendors can still submit data to us on your behalf via FTP). If you are not a Public Interactive Composer Pro client and have not received a login to Composer Basic for data submission, please contact me and I will give your station’s login.