SoundExchange Reporting Blog

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.

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.

Public Interactive and the CPB recently met with SoundExchange to clarify a few outstanding and quite frequently asked questions about SoundExchange reporting. A number of these were related to reporting on classical music. Here are some answers:

Q: Classical recordings often don’t have album titles. What should we report in those cases?

A: Report whatever title is on the physical CD or album from which it came (i.e. what’s on the spine). Whatever it says there is what is to be reported.

Q: How are we supposed to report song titles for classical pieces? Is a Beethoven symphony 4 tracks or 1?

A: However the label divides up the album tracks, that’s what to go on. So, if they split a Beethoven symphony into four tracks, each one is to be reported as a separate song title.

Q: What does “artist” mean for a classical performance? Is this the composer?

A: For classical music the Featured Artist/Group/Orchestra should be the soloist, orchestra or conductor that is featured prominently on the album.

In addition, many stations still have questions about the specific data that Public Interactive needs to collect in order to generate SoundExchange compliant reports. Here are a couple of the most popular and my answers:

Q: What pieces of information about songs do we need to track and report to Public Interactive for SoundExchange reporting?

A: For each song played on each stream, please provide the following data:

1. Song title
2. Featured artist/group/orchestra
3. Album title
4. Marketing label
5. Start date and time of song play
6. End date and time of play or duration of song

Q: Why does Public Interactive need to know the start times and end times or duration of each song?

A: Start and end times/duration are needed to calculate (1) the number of people who heard a given song (in order to match song play time with stream access during that time from your streaming logs) and (2) your station’s music Aggregate Tuning Hours (music ATH), which is the total hours of music streamed times the number of people listening at the time music was played.

Q: What type of data should be included in raw streaming logs?

A: Usually stations don’t have control over what is logged by their streaming server. In general, most streaming server applications (e.g. Shoutcast, Icecast) log similar information. Basically, in order to create SX-compliant reports Public Interactive needs raw streaming access logs that capture the following information:

1. IP Address of requester (for filtering our requests from outside the United States)
2. URL requested
3. Status of request
4. Start date and time of request
5. End date and time or duration or request

Q: Why does Public Interactive need to know the IP address of users accessing our streams?

A: SoundExchange pays royalties based on music streamed to listeners in the United States. They have asked us to filter out requests from users outside of the country. In order to do this (as best as possible) PI needs to know the user’s IP address.

I have updated the FAQ page on this site to include all of these new questions and answers.

Please keep those questions coming!