Listening to the stations
WARM listens to the audio of 21,000+ radio stations in 160+ countries, 24/7: commercial, public, web, college and community radio.
It does not wait for a station to report what it played. It hears the broadcast itself, the way a listener would.
Recognising a song: audio fingerprinting
When you add a song, WARM makes an audio fingerprint of the recording: a compact description of how it sounds. The audio of every monitored station is compared with those fingerprints. When the broadcast matches, WARM logs a play, with the moment it started and how long it ran.
Because the match is made on the sound, a station does not have to publish a playlist or send any data. WARM also catches plays that never appear in a station's published playlist.
A remix or another version of a song sounds different, so it has its own fingerprint and is tracked as its own song.
What one play record holds
Each detected play is stored as one record with these fields:
- The station that played the song
- The country and the city of that station
- The time the play started, in UTC
- How long it played, in seconds
- The song's ISRC, the code that identifies the recording
Monitored stations and the station directory
21,000+ is the number of radio stations WARM listens to around the clock today. A play on any of them is logged.
WARM's station directory is larger: over 70,000 stations can be searched. A station in the directory is not monitored until it is added to active monitoring. You can ask WARM to add one; new stations are added in batches, within 10 days.
Some services quote every station their data could reach, or their whole directory. To compare two services, track the same song for the same week on each and compare the stations and plays they find.
When plays show up, and how far back they go
A new song is processed within 60 minutes of being added. From then on, plays are logged as they are detected.
WARM also searches back for plays it caught before you added the song: 90 days on plans under 50 songs, 365 days from 50 songs, and up to 2 years for API and large accounts, by agreement.
What monitoring cannot see
A play can be missing for a few plain reasons, and each one has a fix:
- The station is not one WARM monitors yet. Check the station list, and ask for it to be added.
- The play happened before the song was added, outside the plan's history window.
- The song was still being processed, which can take up to 60 minutes.
- A detection failed. Support investigates a reported play when you give the station and the time.