Investigation and Resolution Summary
Overview
In conducting a routine review of SoundStack Insights and ARM data, we uncovered an issue that prevented the IP addresses of certain listeners from being associated with their country of origin through our IP lookup partner, MaxMind. As a result, those affected listener’s IP addresses that would ordinarily be matched by MaxMind with a specific country (e.g. “US”) were instead returned as "unknown" to the Insights and ARM database.
This issue began on December 19th, 2024 and was resolved on May 7th, 2025 after being discovered through a routine internal audit. Upon resolution, our team undertook a lengthy project to re-associate all listener IP addresses over the affected time period with their country of origin. As of now, all affected listener sessions for December 2024 through May 2025 have been corrected, along with all associated streaming metrics and SoundExchange report data.
Please note that SoundExchange reports were only affected for the months of December 2024 and January, February and March 2025. This is because we calculate and certify SoundExchange report data 14 days after the end of the applicable month to ensure proper capture of all sessions that cross into the following month. Since this issue was resolved on May 7th and the April SoundExchange report data was not finalized until May 14th, SoundExchange reports for April 2025 and later remain unchanged.
Customer Impact
For customers who retrieved country-specific data from Insights before May 7th, 2025, and where that data pertained to the affected months (December 2024 - May 2025), then the original data retrieved may have been undercounted. The impacted data includes total listening hours (TLH) and performances (for SoundExchange reports). Global metrics across the affected time period remain unchanged.
Based on our findings, the discrepancy between the original and corrected data across this time period was 5% on average. However, depending on the number of new listeners who connected to streams during those months, the discrepancy could be slightly higher or lower.
We understand that for many customers, these reports are submitted to SoundExchange and other rights organizations for use in calculating periodic royalty fees. We urge our customers to retrieve fresh reports from Insights and resubmit to rights organizations promptly as necessary.
Every day, we seek to earn your trust by being transparent and proactive. When an unforeseen issue arises, we take every step to make things right. To that end, if you have any questions or if there is any support we can provide, please reach out to support@soundstack.com or help@live365.com. We will update this article with further clarifications as needed.
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Team SoundStack and Live365