The Clock is Ticking on Q3
It used to be that two things in life were certain: death and taxes. For those streaming music on the web, add one more thing: quarterly SoundExchange reporting.
To that end, this is a reminder to you public radio stations that have chosen to be covered by the CPB-SoundExchange agreement that we’re a little more than three weeks away from the deadline to get us at Public Interactive your reporting data on music streaming for the third quarter of 2009. That deadline is Friday, October 16, 2009!
A number of stations have already given us their data for processing (thanks!) and many, many more have told me they are working on it. We’re happy to take your data as soon as you have it ready. But October 16 is really – honestly, truly – the latest that we’ll be able to take your data for inclusion in Q3 reports that will be submitted to SoundExchange. We submit all station reports in one big batch to SX, so we cannot grant extensions.
I won’t rehash the basics of registration and reporting here; you can read about those particulars in this post.
Let me use this space to answer a few common questions and highlight some other things to keep in mind:
1. Your chosen 14 day reporting period must indeed be fully contained within Q3 (July 1 – September 30). SoundExchange will not accept reports containing data outside those three months.
2. Composer Basic (which includes the SoundExchange Reporting Dashboard) – which will be used to transfer your data files to us – is not yet ready for public consumption. For now, data transfers will continue to be done via FTP.
3. Your playlist files must be in the proper file format, described here, or we cannot process them and, hence, will not be able to file reports on your station’s behalf.
4. If you submitted files to us for Q2 in a different format you still need to submit Q3 files (and beyond) in the required format! For Q2 we accepted just about whatever data we could get, due to the time constraints, but we are requiring the new format going forward.
In other matters, last week in Cleveland I took part in an excellent panel discussion (with lengthy Q&A) on SoundExchange reporting at the PRPD conference. You can access the presentation slides and handouts here. I’ll be participating in a similar session at the upcoming WSPR conference in Portland, OR on Wednesday November 4. If you’re going to be there, be sure to drop by and introduce yourself.
As always, please feel free to contact me with any questions or when you are ready to send us your data files.
Tags: Composer Basic, CPB, PRPD, SoundExchange, WSPR