⭐ Reporting and Analytics

Introduction & Purpose

This topic is intended as a summary of previous discussions and materials
on business reporting and analytics for Resonate. Some of the materials originate from Basecamp topics and teams. The topic is open to all.

Scope

This topic is focused on the collective reporting needs of Resonate and its platform and stakeholders rather than the individual statistical needs of artists, listeners, volunteers or developers / administrators. For example, artist play and earnings statistics will be covered under Artist Analytics. This topic is of interest to all stakeholders, internal and internal, about the totality of Resonate’s business activity.

It is concerned with the discussion and high level definition of requirements for the reports needed to govern Resonate (context and high-level requirements / examples). More detailed epics and user stories will be created in the Platform sub-category for Accounting and Reporting

Resonate Business Plan and KPI’s

Resonate has a business plan (which includes the Community Credentials project business case) and there is a 'KPI’s (key performance indicators) page in it which helps to quantify the growth targets and ambitions. It’s worth a look for context - see slide 18 in here:

Philip Brown and I had a discussion on what might be a starting point for useful KPI’s:

Which metrics, for whom and how often?

Long term, potentially everyone, radically transparent by default, but ALWAYS with respect for privacy of artists and users on the platform (aggregation / dilution protects individuals’ data). For now, the dash is for the exec team / core team of board members who are working with those internal and external KPI’s:

Catalogue:

number of artists and tracks and growth. Rich wants this weekly. It fits with a weekly meetings cycle (ops meeting Monday)

Revenue:

Paid Plays, Overall artists share and revenue per play. Weekly Also, Monthly: co-op share of earnings. Also supporter shares and donations. Also player top-up payments.

Effort and Costs:

Mostly out of scope for now. Monthly.

Development delivery metrics.

From GitHub we could provide a summary of stats for each of our ‘pinned’ repos: Pulse · resonatecoop/stream · GitHub

Volunteer contributions

nothing yet… all we have right now are replies to ‘what are you working on’ in Basecamp. Out of scope until we can get some time recording in place. Other costs… there should / will be a separate financials report - monthly. Out of scope for these stats.

Community engagement

forum posts, participation in weekly open calls - see Discourse statistics. Ideally Weekly. ‘Hot topics’ list (top 5?) in forum?

Membership Growth and Social media / Brand awareness:

Melissa is best placed to advise here. Signups and subscriptions. Twitter, FB etc using SproutSocial and other tools to maintain our profile and brand. Also monitoring press articles. Ideally Weekly.

Growth Initiatives

There is interest in correlation of social media activity and mentions / posts / blogs / newsletters / campaigns with growth trends and spikes… e.g. what drives membership sign up as opposed to basic listening sign up?

Website / Player

We should also have website and newsletter response stats in there… our stats tooling needs to be set up again. We had this: https://www.offen.dev/ …but by default it collected too much. Needs proper requirements for setup. In particular, we need to ‘meter up’ the new signup flow on the website, so that we could one day do this type of thing (EXAMPLE ONLY):

Social and Community Reporting

There has been little systematic reporting to date, but Philip Brown and @nphilmasiakowski are busy looking at the potential to cover these areas, as suggested at a high level in the KPI dashboard and in the points above.

Reporting and Governance

Reports and statistics are useless if they are not actionable, and actioned in a governance process. It is not within the scope of this topic to address the governance processes <links?>, but reporting requirements defined here should have a home and target purpose in the measurement of Resonate processes and their governance by the co-operative.

Current Reports and Artist Payments

There is a 45 minute video tutorial which gives a tour of the current stats spreadsheet and an intro explanation of the update process. It’s available only to volunteer administrators at the moment, owing to privacy constraints:

Contents:

  1. Introduction
  2. Overview
  3. Importing the Data
  4. Checks after Import
  5. Reviewing the Dashboard
  6. Financial Statistics
  7. Payments and Statements
  8. Version Control and Conclusion

There are additional steps involving the attribution of any missing ISRC codes on the detailed statements where this is required by labels and distributors to properly identify releases for rights and onward revenue distribution.

Scope: these statistics are based on what is currently recorded by the player and the reference data available at reporting time.

A technical overview of the current database schema and the query that creates the CSV query results files is available separately (see Platform link to follow)

A new reporting solution design will be created when:

  1. There has been sufficient review and comment on these statistics (relevance, completeness, accuracy etc)
  2. We have stable new back-end source data structures to work from (still changing at the time of writing)

There are a whole lot more monthly statistics outside the scope of the player datasets that we should also be tracking as a co-op… for example, social media and engagement in our user forum.

Trend reporting is particularly important to us. We should be tracking the stats month by month and comparing with our growth targets, so there is a lot of scope to collect previous month figures for the playstats and collect additional membership, financial support and social engagement data so that we have a management tool that is fit for purpose.

Direct Artist, Label and Distributor level sales reporting and track-level reports are produced monthly by the spreadsheet reporting process.

Reporting to Rights Holders / Rights Administrators (Digital Sales Reporting)

We have new obligations under our ICE licence… to be investigated.

Project Reporting

It is desirable to provide a degree of consistency in reporting across Resonate projects in terms of financials, resources and delivery against a roadmap and completion of Resonate’s vision / architecture.

Reporting to National Authorities and Grantors (Taxes and Company Reporting, formal grantor project reporting requirements)

Mostly this is driven through our accounting and financials processes, but it’s important to register here the necessary alignment between the financial, volunteer activity and social perspectives.

Security and Access Control

Most of our current reporting is done in a spreadsheet template, fed by CSV extracts from the player database. It’s not possible to share the granular level data in spreadsheet beyond the core team working on stats owing to privacy and security concerns. The current solution is purely temporary and future solutions (see Platform) will include role based access control and permissioning.

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Hey,
new member here.

i’d be very interested in putting some funds into a bunch of extra shares, but would like to be able to do some basic sanity check of the coop.

would it be possible to share and kind of reporting/compliance data/accounting of the last couple of financial years (if possible in the framework of me as a member of the coop, of course), or to point me to a place where i could read up on that?

thanks in advance

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Greetings @whysthatso.

Welcome! Peace.

Thank you for these questions. Sanity is valuable indeed.

I am preparing some notes for an overview and will post here soon, anticipating (approx 2021-11-04T18:00:00Z.)

If after review you have further questions, I’ll be happy to chat with you or connect you to the information you seek. Cheers!

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Hi @whysthatso!

I hadn’t forgotten you. It just became somewhat complicated for me to answer you in a fashion that I thought would be respectful to the internal dynamics of the co-op.

The fact that these dynamics have not always been sufficiently transparent is a challenge that a number of talented contributors in the co-op have been working on.

Let me explain:

I believe the day you wrote was near the launch of a new Work Team called the @Finance Team. This is a team coo-ordinated by @SueJ who just today introduced herself to the membership at Resonate’s 2021 AGM. Sue began working with the Co-op this Fall in the role of Acting Treasurer and is now standing for election to join the Resonate Board of Directors.

Though I had my perspective on Resonate’s finances when you wrote and was prepared to share some of my projections, etc. I thought it most prudent and respectful to let the collective processes of the organization set the pace.

Since then, the new Financial Team has been working alongside to Sue to prepare a short-term operating plan, presently under review by the Resonate Board. Sue also shared a Treasurer’s Report for consideration of approval by the membership at the AGM session this morning.

The Treasurer’s Report should give you a good general sense of the Co-op’s recent financial history, start-up funding needs and current risks. In January we’ll be pursuing a funding campaign informed by a new Roadmap setting timelines for new product releases built through community participation from artists, listeners and developers.

The first of those sessions is scheduled for Jan 7, 4pm CET. Further details will be posted in the forum.

Again, please reach out if I, or someone else in the community, may answer any questions or benefit from your expertise and perspective.

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Here are some extracts from the Resonate December 2021 stats report (does not include detailed artist / track level data and is BEFORE applying the 1c per play minimum payment ‘collar’ (That starts in January 2022) There’s a much more detailed payments analysis but we can’t share that until we’ve got a proper stats api and a reporting tool built (with security/privacy)

Dash_usage_graph_2021

Dash_earnings_per_play_graph

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I get a bit of a kick from seeing some tangible stats that show how play rates are working out. From this, it looks like the basic mission of fairer payments is working. Cool!

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We’ve been modelling the effect of the 1c per play minimum and that will make things even better… to follow in the Jan dashboard reports.

Maybe we could do with some thinking about stats from a listening perspective?
Max no of listeners concurrent / time period
Listening by region?
Average listening cost metrics
Profiles of listening?
Clustering of listening by genre?
No of playlists / playlisters?
Social media shares

Obviously we would need the signup and forum activity stats as well, plus fundraising stats.

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Some more stats (provisional):

Profiles of listening since January 2017:

127832 paid plays

3077 listeners

image

…expanding that segment of listeners with below 10 plays as a percentage of all listeners:

image

These listeners spent €2,329.43 on listening, of which we gave them €481.72 (21%) in free credits.
Most of them listened to only one song or until they spent their free credit (€0.16) and then left:

image

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Bringing that up to date…

In December 2021 there were:
99 listeners
2706 plays
€44.37 spent
€0.016 avg cost per play

image

A cluster of about 40-50 with a hardcore group of 10? … the rest being newcomers, of which there have been a few more recently…

image

…after a dip mid-year. We’re still down on 2020 listening figures.

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Loving all of this info! Thanks for sorting it out so neatly!

The underlying dataset has userid in it so I can’t share it with you.

Incidentally this data on active and not so active listeners could perhaps be used as the basis of a fundraising appeal, provided we take some advice on the GDPR positioning and what we have said about the use of data on our platform.

Normally I’d be very cautious about that, but in the dire financial circumstances of the coop I guess we could ask folks for permission, clarify the policy options and then (in future, after back-end changes) obfuscate their listening history if they did not grant it.

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All good. I like seeing things from a macro-perspective here too. I think it can help everyone contextualize how Resonate is currently being used, and where areas for improvement are. Since it’s early, there’s a pretty broad scope of things here, but as Resonate continues to build, we can use this information to more consistently improve “on-the-fly” and anonymously track overall platform behaviors to help (subconsciously) generate more efficient improvements for the platform.

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@Nick_M Do I understand the numbers right that in 2021, we typically paid out $0.0212/stream? And that was all before our minimum $0.01/stream guarantee went into effect? :eyes:

Yes that’s right, but the earnings are highly skewed in favour of artists at the top end of the earnings distribution. As a new artist, with new material your earnings are very low. The ‘collar’ fixes that.

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Some folks have been curious and I’d like to share this number. Want to present it accurately. When you say “typical” above, is that an average? Median?

It’s an average. See the stats spreadsheets.

The summary pages are already posted and shared above. It would be good to find a place on here to post the monthly summaries regularly. There are many other pages on new artists this month, new tracks, top artists by plays and so on that could be shared.

The shape of these might be useful as playlists or a complement to @boopboop 's ‘playing now’

(Tech note: The ugly spreadsheet ‘pivot tables’ that generate these are simply queries on top of a query, extract, transfer, spreadsheet import. All that could be replaced by a new elegant stats api, with our user-api security model on it.)

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