Music 1 have built in functions to make the music licensing reports for BMI, ASCAP, PRS/PPL, SoundExchange and the special NPR SoundExchange report. In each case, we went to the reporting agencies and got their requirements and have installed pre-defined reports that conform exactly to specifications of each one. All you have to do is enter the dates and send or ftp the file to the agency.
Officially, SoundExchange reports are supposed to include Title, Artist, Album and Record label. Up to now they’ve not enforced it stringently; if record labels or album titles were missing, they’d accept the report. Going into the new year, they are tightening up and many stations are going to be flagged if the data isn’t included. Also, there will be more emphasis on the ISRC code. That is the code that identifies the specific recording. This is more precise because one song by a big artist might be on multiple albums and because there is a great deal of inconsistency in tagging; like, the meta-data of title/artist/album often includes mistakes or customized Titles or different Artist spellings for collaborations.
The ISRC field is now being used by some stream hosts as the key for the continuing tabulation of Total Performances. The field has always been included in M1’s report maker, even if a station doesn’t have the info entered in M1, the field is there. I had a recent talk with one of the honchos and SoundExchange has told me they now have a service to match and update your library files with the data.
If you send a tab-delimited (or .csv) file to them with your Titles and Artists and Album if you have it, they’ll match your songs with ISRC and fill in your missing Album titles and Record labels, also. A merged file is sent back to you that can then be used to update those fields in your M1 database.
You can make such a report with M1. As you do, I recommend including your Cart number field, that when the data gets back to you from SoundExchange, each record will include that field and it’ll be easier to merge the new data into your M1 library file. Contact me if you need assistance with this.
Steve