Reporting music to Koda

What we call ‘reporting’ here at Koda refers to information received about music that is played publicly, for example on television, on radio or at concerts. All reporting must contain information that identifies the music played, who wrote the music and lyrics, where it was played and the duration of the music. Reporting may also include information on whether the music was played from a CD, live, or whether it took the form of a jingle.

We use this reporting as the basis for the distributions made to you. Distributions are also calculated on the basis of our agreements with music users (our customers) and in accordance with the distribution scheme adopted by Koda's Board of Directors.

As a rule, the music user – i.e. the one who makes the music available to everyone else – is responsible for reporting to Koda. The ‘music user’ can be many things: a television station, a local radio, a church council arranging a church concert, a website provider and so on. For concerts, however, it makes more sense to have the individual bands and artists carry out the reporting: they are the ones who know what was played.

When reporting concerts, it is important that all works played at the concert are reported, regardless of who is carrying out the actual reporting. Concert reporting must be done within one month after the event itself.

As a Koda member, you can also receive payment for music used as background music in shops, restaurants, bars, gyms or at hair salons.

Background music is used in a great many places. This means that it is neither practical nor financially feasible to obtain full, 100% reporting of the music being played in every specific place. Instead, we collect complete reporting from several professional background music providers. Each provider specialises in specific industries where background music is an important part of the customer experience. We regard the reporting collected from them as being to some extent representative of the industry in question.

Our distributions are also based on the reuse of reporting from other performance areas. When combined, this data provides a representative image of the music played as background music in different areas. 

Background music in discotheques and clubs is a special case: here, payment for the use of music is settled on the basis of a compiled list of the most frequently played music works that year. The list is updated every week with data from a minimum of 125 DJs’ Top 20 hit lists from the 100 largest discotheques and clubs in Denmark.

Like this DJ list, full reporting is used as the basis for our distributions within certain other areas too. 

Music consumption on radio and television can either be reported as full reporting (meaning that every single music work is reported to Koda) or based on random sampling.

As regards nationwide and regional radio / TV, cable television, and satellite radio and television broadcast from Denmark, Koda only allows the use of copyrighted music if the station in question submits full reporting of their entire music consumption.

As far as local radio is concerned, Koda collects a sample corresponding to five percent of the local radios’ annual music use, equivalent to more than 200,000 performances. This also means that the total number of performances on Danish local radio amounts to more than four million musical works played per year.

If all performances on local radio were to be reported to Koda, there would be very few pennies left for distribution among the rightsholders. We estimate that if all TV and radio stations were required to submit full reporting, more than two-thirds of the millions paid annually by local radios (a figure in the double digits) would be spent on expenses associated with processing their reporting for distribution purposes. What is more, it would probably not even be possible for local radios to submit full reporting as their operation is often based on unpaid volunteer labour.