SoundExchange Reporting Blog

Attention NFCB members: I’ll be attending your fine annual conference in Houston next month to talk about the future of SoundExchange reporting through NPR Digital Services. Some important changes to the process will be coming later this year and I’ll leading a panel discussion about them on Friday June 15 at the very early hour of 8:00am.

So, if you’re going, don’t stay out too late on Thursday night drinking Texas beer or eating BBQ or roping cattle or whatever. We want you there bright eyed and bushy tailed!

For you non-NFCB members, or those not attending, we’ll be sharing these changes with you as well, via the usual channels (email, blog post, social, smoke signals, etc.) in June, so keep your eyes and ears peeled.

The deadline for submitting your next round of SoundExchange data to NPR Digital Services - for Q2, April 1 through June 30 - has been set: Friday July 6, 2012!

Exciting, right?

Of course, the fact that we’re now accepting data for Q2 means that we finished and submitted the Q1 2012 reports to SoundExchange – which we did last week. It was another great showing by you fine folks. Here are the raw numbers:

• Licensees reporting: 319
• Content channels covered: 517
• Total Aggregate Tuning Hours (ATH)* devoted to music streaming reported: 17.3 million (13.9 million when adjusted to a monthly average)
• Total sound recordings reported: 868k (and then some)
• Total performances reported**: 223 million (give or take)

* One ATH = One hour of content streamed to one listener

** One performance = The streaming of one recording to one listener

That right there is some serious amount of reporting data.

Thanks, as always, to everyone who made a serious effort to meet their reporting obligations. Remember, you’re not doing it for our benefit; you’re doing it because it’s your legal responsibility. If you stream music, you must report or risk being in violation of federal copyright laws.

But you already knew that – right? Of course you did.

Anyway, keep up the good work and get that Q2 data to us ASAP.

April Fool’s Day is over so, unfortunately, this isn’t a joke: the deadline to submit your Q1 2012 SoundExchange reporting data to us at NPR Digital Services is (insert ominous music here) this Friday, April 6! So there’s precious little time left to procrastinate.

If you haven’t submitted yet, please don’t wait any longer! Send it our way and please let me know as soon as you do…

Spring is coming! I don’t know about where you live, but here in Boston spring actually seemed to unofficially start in, oh, about January. If this is what global warming is all about, then count me in!

In any case, spring officially begins in a week or so and you can smell it in the air! Know what else is looming that you can also smell in the air? That’s right – the deadline for submitting your Q1 2012 SoundExchange data to us at NPR Digital Services! That deadline (for reporting data covering the period January 1 through March 31) is Friday, April 6.

If you’ve already submitted your data but haven’t checked with me, please do so immediately! Do not assume that no news is good news.

On the other hand, if you’ve completed your reporting weeks but have not yet submitted your data,  please do so immediately! Then, see the preceding paragraph.

Happy spring to all!

Thanks to the blood, sweat and tears (not to mention the cursing) of lots of people, NPR Digital Services was able to complete and submit the Q4 2011 SoundExchange reports last week.

For those interested in the gory details, the reports covered:

• 327 stations
• 522 content channels
• 19.4 million aggregate tuning hours devoted to music streaming
• 890,000(ish) recordings

Each (featured) performer on every one of those recordings is now eligible to collect royalty money (paid on behalf of your station by the CPB) from SoundExchange. See? We’re helping starving (and some not-so-starving) artists to get paid!

Now that the hangover from the Q4 reports has (just about) cleared, it’s time to face reality and get crackin’ on your reporting data for the Q1 2012 reports. Those data should come from with the period of January 1 through March 31 and must be submitted to to NPR Digital Services by Friday, April 6 2012.

Keep up the great work, everyone!

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.