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…

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.

Happy 2010 everyone! Let’s start off the year with some legal housekeeping.

As a condition of the Webcasting Performance Agreement between CPB and SoundExchange we are required to notify all entities covered by the agreement of the following:

As of January 1, 2011, Covered Entities must comply with the reporting requirements applicable to Web Site Performances under 37 C.F.R. Part 370 and other regulations, as well as comply with their other obligations under Sections 112 and 114 of the Copyright Act. Covered Entities should begin diligent efforts to prepare to do so in advance of January 1, 2011. A failure to comply with such reporting requirements may cause Web Site Performances on or after January 1, 2011 to infringe the copyright in any Sound Recordings performed.

We’ll be emailing this reminder to you covered stations in the next few days also.

As we all try and recover from the insanity that was Q3 SoundExchange reporting (well, some of us aren’t done with it yet – so recovery will have to wait), I would like call everybody’s attention to this recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board.

The gist of it is that the CRB has decreed that most digital music services must now do census reporting! That means full-quarter, 24×7 reporting of what music you stream, not sample, 14-days-per-quarter reporting that most stations covered by the CPB-SoundExchange deal must do.

The good news for stations covered by the CPB-SX deal is that this decision does not apply to you and you get to keep doing sample reporting through the end of 2015.

After that, well, we’ll just have to see.

So, see – it could be worse. Like six-times-the-amount-of-work-worse.

A few other things to note:

• The article reiterates the data fields that must be reported for each song streamed: Title, Artist, Album and Label.
• You’ll see mention there also of reporting the number of performances (or actual total performances – ATP) of each song, which is the number of people who actually heard the song. Stations covered by the CPB-SX agreement reporting through Public Interactive don’t have to calculate this number. We do it for you for reporting back to SoundExchange, but in order to do so we need the start and end times of each song play (or the start time and duration), as well as your streaming access logs.
• One statistic not mentioned in the article but that stations also have to calculate and report are total Aggregate Tuning Hours (ATH), for all programming. Stations reporting under the CPB-SX agreement instead report their Music Aggregate Tuning Hours (MATH) – or the ATH for just music programming – which, again, Public Interactive calculates on behalf of stations, using the start and end time of each song play and the streaming access logs.

So, to summarize, if the CPB-SX agreement were not in place (and had the CPB not hired Public Interactive to help with reporting), most public broadcasters would have to:

1. Still collect all of the same data about songs streamed, not just for two weeks a quarter, but for every song streamed, all day, every day.
2. Use the raw data to calculate the required SoundExchange statistics (ATP and ATH), or pay for software or a service that will do these calculations, instead of having PI do it for free.
3. Pay performance royalties to SoundExchange, instead of having the CPB pay the royalties.

Feel better now?

Finally, I draw your attention to the last two sentences in the article:

In recent meetings, SoundExchange has indicated that it is going to emphasize reporting requirements, and potentially take action against webcasters who ignore their obligations.  Don’t become an example.

If you are not doing so already, I urge you to begin complying completely with the reporting requirements.

Last week a number of us from Public Interactive, NPR and the CPB were interviewed by Karen Everhart of Current about the CPB-SoundExchange agreement and some of the issues this has raised with stations. The resulting article that Karen wrote was published this week and is pretty good. I encourage you to read it, if you haven’t already.

Karen did a good job of getting the facts straight; I only noticed one error in the article. The following comment is not right:

Under the current contract, some 270 stations, or 60 percent of the 450 that are eligible, are required to begin reporting this year.

The agreement is actually to report on 60% of music ATH in the system by the end of 2009 (and 80% by the end of 2010), not 60% of the covered entities. Just for the record, your honor.

As many of you classical music folks will recall, there has been a semi-open question about how to report to SoundExchange when an entire classical piece has been played. When I initially asked SoundExchange this question, they reported that stations should report each track as it is broken down on the CD or album by the record label. That is to say, if a label breaks a Beethoven symphony into four separate tracks, and the whole symphony is played, then all four tracks need to be reported separately.

Understandably, many of you expressed concern over this requirement, since it can create a lot more work, particularly when pieces with lots of movements (e.g. operas) are played in whole.

Actually, “concern” is an understatement.

So, I went back to SoundExchange and explained the issue and asked if they were really sure about their initial answer. Could stations, I asked, just report the whole piece are one, rather than having to list each track separately?

It took a while but they finally got back to me with a final, definitive answer.

Which most of you won’t like.

For better or for worse, they have reaffirmed their first answer. They still want stations to list each track in a piece separately, as they are broken down by the record label.

I wish I could give you guys the answer you wanted. I tried, I really did, to plead the case. But, no go.

That is the requirement so, as I have said all along, do your best to meet it.

Last week the CPB announced that it has reached an agreement with SoundExchange to cover music streaming by public broadcasters through 2015. Recall that the agreement reached earlier this year covered the period January 1, 2005 through December 31, 2010. The new agreement runs from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2015.

The new agreement is similar to the existing one, and contains the same basic parameters:

1. The CPB covers all royalty payments for all covered stations for the period of the agreement.

2. Stations must continue to report quarterly (through Public Interactive) on the music they stream and the number of people that heard it. The vast majority of stations will continue to do only sample reporting (i.e. reporting on two weeks out of each quarter). Currently, only the top 20% of streamers have to do full-census reporting; starting in 2010 (under the current agreement and continuing through the next agreement) the top 30% of streaming music stations will need to do full census reporting. Public Interactive will stations know if they fall into the top 30% of music streamers.

3. Stations are still responsible for abiding by the terms of the Performance Complement of the DMCA.

This is good news for everyone. Honest.

Below is an official mailing on the agreement sent out last week.

Feel free to contact me with questions.

To:       Public Radio System Leaders
From:   Bruce Theriault, Senior Vice President, Radio, CPB;  Jeff Luchsinger, Director, Radio System Investment, CPB
Date:   August 6, 2009
Subject: New CPB-SoundExchange Agreement 2011 – 2015

Dear Colleagues;

We are pleased to announce that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting(CPB) has reached an agreement with SoundExchange (SX) that defines the terms, conditions, and costs for public broadcasters to provide (music) sound recordings over the Internet for the period Jan. 1, 2011 through December 31, 2015.

As you will remember, CPB and a team including NPR and the Station Resource Group came to an agreement with SX in January of this year for the period 2004 – 2010. The new agreement was reached under the Small Webcasters Settlement Act, which was recently amended by Congress and signed by the President to permit the execution of agreements under the Act until midnight, July 30, 2009. The new agreement continues to recognize public radio’s special public service mission and non-commercial nature. It also maintains public radio’s commitment that artists and labels featured on public radio station websites receive the compensation to which they are entitled.

CPB will make annual payments to SX over the term of the new agreement to cover qualified public radio stations (CPB qualified, NPR member and NFCB member stations) and NPR, PRI, APM, and PRX. The type and format of the reports that public radio stations must provide to take advantage of the new CPB-SX blanket agreement are essentially unchanged from those described in the current agreement. To secure the benefits of these agreements most stations will have an obligation to provide quarterly data on usage of their Internet streams and accurate playlists of sound recordings played on their websites. A sub-set of stations will be required to provide census reporting. These reports supply SX with the information necessary to make payments to artists and labels.

Earlier this year CPB selected NPR/Public Interactive (NPR/PI) as the sole agent to collect and report public radio music streaming activities to SX and to assist stations in complying with the reporting requirements. PI has been moving quickly to get stations up to speed and provided the first quarterly reports to SX last month. The deadline for the next set of quarterly reports is October, 16, 2009.

As many of you have already heard me say, I’m am not a lawyer – nor do I play one on TV or in the workplace. Depending on your outlook, this may be a good thing or a bad thing. Unfortunately, for you stations that have asked me specific questions about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), specifically about what restrictions it imposes on what you can and can’t stream, that means I can’t answer your question.

The DMCA is, to put it mildly, confusing. In order to really understand it or interpret it, I would strongly recommend you consult your own legal counsel, as Public Interactive cannot provide legal counsel or advice.

However, we can direct you to something called the Performance Complement to the DMCA which outlines the basic restrictions on streaming. You can download it here. We strongly recommend that everybody take a look at it.

Honestly, though, beyond sharing this document, we can’t offer any advice. Again, please consult with your own legal counsel for proper interpretation and guidance.

Perhaps I should have gone to law school after all… oh well.

For those interested, here is the actual agreement signed between CPB and SoundExchange, laying out the full reporting specifications. It is in the public domain and can be shared feely with anyone, including vendors interested in providing CPB-SX compliant reports or data.

It’s chock full of legal-ese and makes for great before-bedtime reading!