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Calculating 'Aggregate Tuning Hours'

You are reading part of an article titled 'Calculating Aggregate Tuning Hours', hosted on www.radioactivity.fm.

www.radioactivity.fm is a web-based system for radio station playlist logging, reporting, and tracking. If you are interested in this sort of thing, please feel free to look around, because we also have a blog, and some online tools that may interest you.

Part 2: What is ATH?

The definition of Aggregate Tuning Hours, from the Copyright Royalty Board:

(b) Definitions. (1) Aggregate Tuning Hours are the total hours of programming that a nonsubscription transmission service, preexisting satellite digital audio radio service, new subscription service or business establishment service has transmitted during the reporting period identified in paragraph (c)(3) of this section to all listeners within the United States over the relevant channels or stations, and from any archived programs, that provide audio programming consisting, in whole or in part, of eligible nonsubscription service, preexisting satellite digital audio radio service, new subscription service or business establishment service transmissions, less the actual running time of any sound recordings for which the service has obtained direct licenses apart from 17 U.S.C. 114(d)(2) or which do not require a license under United States copyright law.

In short: an hour of programming, streamed to one online listener, on one channel - if you haven't licensed the content yourself or and the content is not exempt from U.S. Copyright law - that's one ATH. The definition includes a few ATH calculation examples:

For example, if a nonsubscription transmission service transmitted one hour of programming to 10 simultaneous listeners, the nonsubscription transmission service's Aggregate Tuning Hours would equal 10. If 30* minutes of that hour consisted of transmission of a directly licensed recording, the nonsubscription transmission service's Aggregate Tuning Hours would equal 9 hours and 30 minutes. If one listener listened to the transmission of a nonsubscription transmission service for 10 hours (and none of the recordings transmitted during that time was directly licensed), the nonsubscription transmission service's Aggregate Tuning Hours would equal 10.

(* - the original federal publication contained a typo here, specifying '3' instead of '30'. It was corrected later )

Without getting into the the question of how one determines what percentage of content, per hour, is exempt from U.S. copyright law - the obvious place to start looking how to solve this problem is in your station's streaming server logs.

Click here to continue to part 3: Streaming Server Logs

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: What is ATH?
Part 3: Streaming server logs
Part 4: Complicating factors
Part 5: Putting it all together - our online tools