Have you noticed a chill in the air? It could be because Fall has arrived – or because, like Halloween, the Q3 data submission deadline is almost upon us!
Boo!
That deadline again, in case you don’t recall, is a little over a week away – Friday, October 8, 2010. It covers the period July 1 – September 30, 2010. All the gory details are here.
Couple of other juicy reporting tidbits:
1. We’ve added some new syndicated shows to the list of those providing us with playlist data. Be sure to keep an eye on the list of such shows here and make sure that your program guide in Composer Basic or Pro properly reflects when you streamed these syndicated shows during your reporting weeks.
2. While we’re on the topic of syndicated shows, I’m sure everyone knows of the name change for Speaking of Faith to Being. Many folks have already asked what this means for SoundExchange reporting and whether stations need to do anything on their end to ensure those playlists continue to get integrated into their reports. The answer is stations don’t need to do anything! PI will change the name of the show in Composer Basic and Pro to reflect the change.
3. PI has been in discussions with WFMT about obtaining playlists for their syndicated offerings (e.g., the Beethoven Satellite Network, the Jazz Satellite Network, etc.). They assured us they will be providing the data to PI in the near future. I’ll let everyone know when that’s the case – or if, for some reason, they don’t, in which case stations would need to get the data directly from WFMT themselves.
We’re also working with our buddies at PRX, to get playlists for their offerings.
4. Some of you may have noticed that we’ve added a new check to detect song overlaps in playlist files (i.e., songs that are identified as having been played at the same time).
If you upload a playlist file with song overlaps, a warning explaining this will be written to the error file, which you can view by clicking on the View link in the Error File column on the Upload Playlists/Streaming Logs screen.
You can see which songs overlap by opening the processed file, which you can review by clicking on the View link in the Processed File column on the same screen. Search for Song overlap in this file and you’ll the instances of overlap.
Song overlaps only lead to a warning, not an error, meaning they won’t prevent us from generating a report for you. It does mean, however, that some over counting of listening will occur due to the overlap.
Why should anyone care about over counting? Because over counting leads to inflated Music Aggregate Tuning Hours which can lead to higher royalty payments for the entire system. Not good.
Occasional overlaps of a few seconds here and there are no big deal, although, ideally, no overlapping is what everyone should be striving for. If your overlaps are more than a few seconds – or are something persistent your file – please take the time to review and fix them as best you can. It’s for the common good. Honest.
OK, that’s more than enough for now. Good luck, and thanks for all the hard work, everyone!
P.S. It was great to meet so many of you at this past weekend’s Public Radio Programming Directors conference in Denver! Next conference up for me: the Western States Public Radio conference in Las Vegas.
