[Icecast-dev] Icecast stats.xml

[Daniel James]

Hi Thomas,

> So far we were
> mostly under the impression that a combination of playlist.log and the
> information available through the various admin XML representations
> (there is more than the main stats XML) would be sufficient.

The critical issue for us has been whether the Icecast service is
provided by a third party. In that case, you need some API to fetch
listener connection times and listener IP addresses for geolocation,
assuming that your Icecast provider does not deliver these stats as part
of the hosting package.

Since there is no world-wide flat fee system for calculating music
royalties, you need to know at least the 'aggregate tuning hours' and
the territories of listeners in order to make sure that you are paying
the right amount to the right national collecting society.

There are some reciprocal royalty arrangements for recording royalties
organised by the IFPI, but these arrangements do not include
SoundExchange in the USA. Then you have the separate issue of songwriter
copyrights, which vary from country to country.

If you run your own Icecast server, you can collect and report this
listener information from logs using something like Piwik or Kibana, e.g:

http://sourcefabric.booktype.pro/airtime-25-for-broadcasters/icecast-statistics-with-piwik/

but even then, you might prefer to isolate the servers and fetch the
information over an API instead.

Ultimately, it would be great if the Icecast admin interface provided
the stats breakdown and something like monthly reports, but that might
be more feature creep than you're willing to contemplate.

Cheers!

Daniel