SoundExchange Reporting Blog

I’m just back from a few days in San Francisco for the annual NFCB Community Radio Conference. I had a great time meeting lots of people, attending lots of interesting sessions and sampling some of the great local eats.

I also got to participate in a great panel discussion about music licensing. I spoke for a few minutes about – brace yourself – SoundExchange reporting for stations covered by the CPB-SoundExchange Webcasting Performance Agreement. The panel also included John Crigler and Melodie Virtue, two excellent lawyers from Garvey Schubert Barer in Washington, D.C. who know quite a bit about copyright issues and how they affect public broadcasters. In addition, Travis Ploeger, SoundExchange’s Manager of Licensing and Enforcement, was there and spoke in detail about statutory licensing for webcasters.

Travis, John and Melodie presented lots of great information and answered many excellent questions from station folk. I found it quite helpful and informative and hopefully the session attendees did as well. Nobody cried, cursed or stormed out in anger, so, all in all, I’d call it a success!

I had a few slides on SoundExchange reporting, which you can download here.

Travis also had some slides related to the statutory license, which you can download here.

This was my first time attending an NFCB conference and I hope to go to future ones. Thanks to all who attended our panel and a big thanks to the fine NFCB folks who put it all together!

This week I’m headed to lovely San Francisco for the annual NFCB Community Radio Conference. It’ll be my first time attending this gathering so I’m excited to meet lots of folks and attend a lot of interesting sessions.

I will also be participating in a panel Music Licensing on Thursday, June 2 from 4:00-5:15pm, which should be very informative and useful for any stations that stream music. Here are the session details:

Music Licensing
Moderator: Janis Lane-Ewart, KFAI, Minneapolis, MN
John Crigler, Garvey Schubert Barer, Washington, D.C.
Phil Johnson, NPR Digital Services, Boston, MA
Alan Korn, Berkeley, CA
Travis Ploeger, SoundExchange, Washington, D.C.
Melodie Virtue, Garvey Schubert Barer, Washington, D.C.
Everything you ever wanted to know about music licensing—for broadcast, for streaming, for podcasting and other digital media.  Who gets paid how much and by whom; reporting requirements and how to meet them; the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and what it means to you.

If you’re going to the conference, you won’t want to miss this chance to learn from, and ask questions of, the experts – not me so much (though I’ll be happy to answer your reporting questions), but a couple of great legal minds with lots of experience in this area AND a real, live SoundExchange representative. Don’t miss it!

Joining me at the conference will also be NPR Digital Services’ Sales and Marketing Manager Joe Orlando, who’ll be available to answer your questions about any and all of our offerings, and Keith Hopper, our Director of Product Strategy, who’ll be taking part in a panel on Content Management Systems on Thursday morning.

Here’s the full NFCB conference agenda.

Even if you don’t attend my session, please say hello if you see me! I’d love to press the flesh and put faces to names (and call letters)…

Looking for something new to like on Facebook? Or for a new Twitter account to follow? Or how about a new YouTube channel to subscribe to? Well, then, how’s about hooking up with our friends at SoundExchange via social media?

That’s right, everybody’s favorite performing rights organization is very active in the social media world. Here are some of the ways that you can interact with them:

• Like them on Facebook; too bad there isn’t an option to love them on FB (you know you want to).
• Follow them on Twitter – but, wait, they also have a dedicated Twitter account for support issues here.
• Subscribe to the YouTube channel, which is where they post lots of interesting and helpful videos including artist testimonials and webinars for artists, labels and service providers.

I would encourage you to check them out on these sites; I find them all very informative and the SoundExchange staff is quite willing to interact, answer questions and generally be helpful, particularly on Twitter.

But if all this social media stuff ain’t your bag, you can always go old school and simply check out their web site and, specifically, their blog, for lots of information as well.

Potentially bad news for those of you who stream music from EMI: they just announced that they’re withdrawing a portion of their catalog from ASCAP for new media licensing.

What does that mean?

It means that if you currently stream music that they’ve pulled out of ASCAP, you will now have to negotiate directly with (and potentially pay royalties directly to) EMI for the rights to keep streaming the music that as been withdrawn.

Ouch.

Of course, these rights, which are for the underlying musical compositions, are separate from the royalties that SoundExchange collects and distributes for performance rights to the sound recording.

David Oxenford has lots more information on this here.

Once again, thanks to lots of hard work by lots of people, a not-so-minor miracle has been worked and the latest batch of  quarterly reports (for Q1 2011) have been delivered to SoundExchange !

This latest round, submitted on Friday afternoon, covered 314 stations, 500(!) distinct content channels,  and 13,352,321 (music) aggregate tuning hours. It was yet another monumental effort of cat herding, data crunching and generally turning water into wine.

A big thanks goes to all who submitted data and to our most excellent tech folks here who crunch all that data to compile the statistics and reports. Well done, all!

For those who don’t already know, you can download your actual report (or reports, as there is a separate report for each channel) we generated and submitted on your behalf directly from Composer Pro or Basic.

• Just log in an go to View Reports under the SoundExchange Dashboard.
• There you’ll see a list of the reporting status for each of your channels for the current and past quarters.
• Scroll down to Q1 2011 (or whatever past quarter with a status of Complete) and click on the quarter in the left hand column; that’s the file that we generate from your data and send to SoundExchange.

Feel to free to download these reports and save for your records. Also, if I may, go ahead and print them out; these reports make for fantastic beach reading! Later this year we’re hoping to release e-reader compatible versions…

Of course, the best part of getting a round of reports done is that it means that it’s time to start all over again, this time for the Q2 2011 reports! Those reports, of course, cover April 1 through June 30 and the deadline for getting your data to us at NPR Digital Services is Friday, July 8, 2011. We are now ready, willing and able to accept your Q2 data.

Thanks again and keep up the great work, everyone!

Does your station regularly air or stream only portions of a multi-hour syndicated program and, if so, have you ever wondered how you can get the correct playlists integrated into your SoundExchange reports? Well, wonder no more!

We’ve recently added the functionality to specify which hours of a syndicated program you air or stream. If we receive playlists from the show producer, we’ll then be able to integrate the proper subset of the show playlist into your quarterly SoundExchange reports and (if you’re a Composer Pro client) into your online Program Guide.

Wanna see how to do that? Sure, you do! So, let’s give it a try…

Let’s say that you stream the second hour of UnderCurrents on Wednesday from noon to 1:00pm. First thing to do is go to Create/Edit Program Guide and create the entry for UnderCurrents Wednesday at noon for an hour, being sure to choose it from the list of syndicated programs under Program, like so:

So, now UnderCurrents is in your guide and associated with the playlists that they provide directly to NPR Digital Services. Yay! Problem is, you air the second hour of the show but, by default, our system assumes that you start the show at the beginning and so the playlist we assign to that hour are for the first hour of the show.

What to do?

Here’s what you can now do to rectify this: go to Create/Edit A Playlist, which brings you to the Playlist Manager screen. Scroll down to Wednesday at noon and click on the Choose a different syndicated playlist icon there for UnderCurrents:

That’ll bring you to the following screen:

You may already be familiar with this screen, as it allows you to choose the specific episode of a syndicated program that you aired on a given date. Now, though, if you scroll to the bottom of the screen you’ll see:

This is where you can specify that you start the show with the second hour. Choose the hour of the show you start with, then pick the associated show episode and bingo! You’re now good to go.

Pretty cool – yes? Well, we think so…

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.

For those who missed the big announcement, last week Public Interactive underwent a name change: we’re now known as NPR Digital Services. This is part of a broader plan to expand the services that we offer to public broadcasters, the first step of which is the Core Publisher. As we say while we now have a new name and  expanded services, we’re still keeping the same nonprofit dress code (whew!).

More information on our new services will be forthcoming in the coming weeks and months, so keep an eye peeled for that and, of course, feel free to contact me with any questions.

Also last week, I gave a brief talk at  AMPPR‘s Public Radio Music Conference in New York City. in addition to fielding questions related to SoundExchange reporting, I also presented some interesting stream usage and song play statistics that we’ve pulled from all that data you’ve been submitting to us. You can see the slides I presented here.

I enjoyed attending the conference and meeting more of you folks face-to-face. The next conference I’m scheduled to attend will be the big NFCB conference in early June. I hope to see many of you there!

Big conference week for us!

I’ll be speaking at AMPPR’s Public Radio Music Conference in New York City on Thursday, March 10 about – what else? – SoundExchange reporting. In addition to answering whatever questions you guys have, I’ll be sharing some interesting stats, charts and graphs on some of things we’ve gleaned from all the data that we’ve been collecting.

Meanwhile, down in Austin we’ll be well represented at the iMA conference, where we’re hosting the opening reception, on Thursday from 7:30-9:30pm where our new leader, Bob Kempf, will speak (click here to RSVP).

A number of of our folks will also be taking part in the session Take Advantage of NPR and PBS! Tactics You Can Implement Now (Friday at 9:45am), where they’ll be discussing topics like Project Argo and NPR’s Core Publisher Pilot.

If you’ll be attending one of these conference, be sure to say hello to me or my co-workers! We don’t bite.

Finally, if you haven’t done the following two things already, please do so ASAP:

1. Register for coverage under the new CPB-SoundAgreement

2. Submit your Q1 2011 SoundExchange reporting data (deadline, Friday, April 8, 2011)

We hope to see you in New York or Austin!

One question that comes my way regularly in regards to music streaming is about podcasting and whether it falls under the terms of the CPB-SoundExchange webcasting agreement. The short answer is that it doesn’t. The statutory license administered by SoundExchange only covers non-interactive digital music offerings (e.g. streams).

Offering copyrighted recordings as part of a podcast is whole other matter from doing it via a stream/webcast and introduces a whole new set of legal questions. When someone asks me about it, I always refer people to their own legal counsel in order to understand all of the intricacies involved.

Recently, this question came up on the Public Radio Discussion Group mailing list and someone (only identified as Will R) posted links to two very, very useful articles on the legal and copyright issues around podcasting. They were so good that I wanted to share them here for those not on the list.

The first was Podcasting Stripped to Basics by Carly Didden of the law firm Garvey Schubert Barer.

The second was the more detailed Podcasting Legal Guide, for those who really want to get into the nitty-gritty.

If you’re thinking of podcasting music I highly, strongly and fervently recommend that you at least read the former. Great stuff.

Big thanks to Will R for sharing these articles, whoever you are…!