Analytics & Reporting Manager creates reports with detailed information about what sound recordings were performed on your stations and streams. This generated report data is in the format required by SoundExchange as of the time of publishing this article.
Once you click on SoundExchange from the left-hand menu, you have two options: Generate and Filters.
Generate creates a report, listing tracks for a specific station according to the date range. Once the report matches your expectations, it can be exported to a CSV file.
Note: Using Generate report feature will allow you to generate reports for only up to 5 stations at a time. If you try selecting more than 5 stations, the visual interface will tell you to select one single station to generate a report. However, we recommend using E-mail Reports for more than one station. By getting 5 reports at once, you risk waiting there longer to load.
The Filters function allows you to exclude some items from your SoundExchange reports. The most common examples of items not needing to be included in these reports are station IDs and jingles, as well as any talk shows, weather, or news segments.
Filter patterns can include the exact track metadata titles of the files you wish to exclude. Filter patterns use regular expression syntax, and we've provided some examples below. This pattern-matching works for both track titles and artist names. Optionally, you may choose to filter out all files that include a certain word or snippet in their name.
Keep in mind that Filters are case-sensitive!
To exclude all tracks that contain “News Report” in their name, this can be done as follows:
The regular expression pattern for filtering out tracks that include a certain snippet is:
.*Word1 Word2.*
This pattern will not exclude tracks containing Word1 or Word2 in their name but rather exclude all tracks containing these two words in a sequence.
If it's needed to only filter through track titles, the following snippet should be added:
^ - .*News Report.*
Only for the artist, the next snippet will be used:
.*News Report.* - ^
We recommend against using filters that are too generic, such as simply “News” or “Midnight”. Although rare, music tracks that include these words as part of their song title or artist name do exist. If the filter is too generic, it might end up excluding tracks that actually do need to be reported to SoundExchange.
After creating the filter and generating the new SoundExchange report for your station(s), if the targeted tracks appear on a full red background, as seen in the image below, this means the filter is working properly.
When exporting the SoundExchange report to a CSV file, these tracks will not appear at all, which is basically the entire purpose of applying these filters.