RadioActivity.fm: Articles
On the SoundExchange "Reports of Use Delivery Specifications"
Chapter 4: Aggregate Tuning Hours
Aggregate tuning hours is complex enough to merit its own chapter.
Here's a summarized definition of Aggregate Tuning Hours:
Aggregate Tuning Hours are the total hours of programming that ... a service has transmitted during the reporting period .. to all listeners within the United States over the relevant channels or stations, and from any archived programs, that provide audio programming ... less the actual running time of any sound recordings for which the service has obtained direct licenses ... or which do not require a license under United States copyright law.
In short - an hour of programming, to one online listener, on one channel, if you haven't licensed the content yourself
or know for a fact that the content exempt from U.S. Copyright law - that's one ATH.
If ten people listen to your stream for an hour - and it's all non-exempt content you haven't licensed yourself
- your station's ATH for that hour is 10.
By now, perhaps you can see where this is leading - for your report to SoundExchange, which reports two 7-day periods for your station, your station must also calculate the ATH for these periods. Doing so means tallying
1) The number of U.S. stream listeners during these time frames
2) How many hours of content they listened to
3) How much of that content was not direct-license or copyright-free
Tallying #'s 1 and 2 are difficult, but not impossible. Doing so is complicated enough that RadioActivity.fm had to create and document a streaming server logfile parsing tools in order to do so, but that's exactly what we did. (This is the subject of another article, titled: 'Calculating Aggregate Tuning Hours'.)
Tallying #3, however, is left to the station.
Once an ATH has been determined via this process, it can be inserted into the SoundExchange report. Since the SoundExchange report calls for two 7-day timespans, however, it is important to determine an ATH for each timespan and apply it accordingly.
Continue to Part 5: The SoundExchange reporting specs
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Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Key concepts and issues Part 3: Decisions, decisions Part 4: Part 5: The SoundExchange reporting specs Part 6: Conclusions |