New collaboration provides better radio reporting

Local radio stations must report their music usage to TONO and Gramo. Now, a new reporting collaboration between TONO, Gramo and the Norwegian Local Radio Association will increase the quality of reporting to the two rights organizations.

– Local radio stations have always been obliged to report music usage to us. Unfortunately, for many, this has proven to be difficult in practice, perhaps especially for the smallest radio stations. But we need these reports to be able to settle the bill as precisely as possible, says reporting manager at TONO Elin Heer, who calls the new solution really good news.

– With far more complete reports on all music use over the course of a year, we will be able to capture more of the music use on local radio stations around the country. This means that we will have greater diversity in the radio calculations as we know that some local radio stations are good at playing local repertoire, she says.

Deadline February 1st
Radio stations must now report all music usage for 2019 in the new system by February 1.
The technical solution was initially developed by the Norwegian Local Radio Association in collaboration with Gramo, while TONO has been involved since 2019 and has contributed to its further development.

– Our role as an association has been to put in place a solution that enables local radio stations to comply with the obligations in the agreement that each concessionaire has entered into with TONO and Gramo. In this case, this means ensuring that our members have access to a tool that generates reports in the correct format, and that TONO and Gramo can read automatically, says Pål Lomeland, CEO of the Norwegian Local Radio Association.

– Few automatic playback programs used by local radio stations are capable of creating files that extract the necessary and required report information, and that TONO and Gramo will be able to accept. Now, automatic operations ensure that finished and approved music reports are generated and uploaded to both organizations.

Resource-smart solution
Elin Heer is very satisfied that the reports are automatic, and thus do not take up large amounts of resources in her department:

– Normally, this amount, with reports of this magnitude from dozens of new channels, would have meant that we would have had to hire new employees. We don't need that now, and thus we can also keep costs down in TONO, which is always a goal for us.

The reporting tool can be found here: https://www.lokalradio.no/musikkrapport/(Requires member login)