The final playlist on the Traditional station was made up entirely of different versions of “Silent Night” and “Do You Hear What I Hear?”

Thank you for listening and your support over the years.

OK, here are real numbers, from my network of stations. I’m still crunching numbers, but since most of my stations are Christmas-themed, most of my listening occurs between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. I won’t have detailed stats on December 2015 until some time in 2016, so this is what happened last year, the calendar month of December 2014.

There were 3,583 different songs played across my stations in December 2014, with a total of 4,101,098 performances. Some songs were played on smaller stations and only had a handful of listeners. Some songs were played on the flagship station and so were heard by several thousand people simultaneously. Multiple the number of performances (4,101,098) times the cost of each performance ($0.0017) and you get a royalty bill for December 2014 of $6,971.87.

The VIP referral awards, listener awards, and ads on the Christmas Music 24/7 web site don’t come anywhere close to earning nearly $7,000, plus whatever other royalties wold have been due for January through November. Niche webcasters simply can’t afford these rates.

The new rates for 2016 are $0.0017 per song per listener. So right now I have a total of 1,133 listeners. That would cost me $1.93 in royalties. Multiply that times 14 songs per hour, that is $26.97 per hour in royalties. This network of stations doesn’t earn anywhere near that amount of money. Of course, that amount is lower at night when there are only a few hundred listeners, and higher in the middle of the day when there are closer to 2,000 listeners. I’ll put some more specific historical data together later. Apparently, SoundExchange is going to give some information out next week on how small webcasters may be able to be managed in the future, but that is really the only hope available right now. The other long shot is going back to Congress and asking them for relief, like we did years ago with the Small Webcasters Act.

Thank you for your support over the past 11+ years. Mike

For my Christmas Music 24/7 stations, I have to send a report each month to SoundExchange with a complete census of what songs I played when, with how many listeners each had. I already have the basic information she’s looking for. If I ever play any of her music, I’ll gladly share that info with her.

And for the rest of the artists out there that I play (over 1,250 different artists in August 2012), the offer stands for you as well. Just get in touch with me and we’ll get it worked out. (I hope I don’t get 1,250 emails in the next couple days asking for data!)

Thank you for your support this year.

PITTSBURGH, Nov. 30, 2009 — Thanks to the weak economy in 2009 the PNC Christmas Price Index increased by a modest 1.8 percent compared to last year in the whimsical economic analysis by PNC Wealth Management based on the prices of gifts in the holiday classic, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

According to the 26th annual survey, the price tag for the PNC CPI is $21,465.56 in 2009, just $385.46 more than last year. It is the smallest increase since 2002, when the index fell 7.6 percent.

The PNC CPI exceeds the U.S. government’s Consumer Price Index, the widely used measure of inflation calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is down 1.3 percent this year.

Among the 12 gifts in the Index, three items fell measurably from last year while five increased in cost and four remained steady.

As part of its annual tradition, PNC Wealth Management also tabulates the “True Cost of Christmas,” which is the total cost of items gifted by a True Love who repeats all of the song’s verses. This holiday season, very generous True Loves will receive a bargain and pay $87,402.81 for all 364 gifts, a mere 0.9 percent increase compared to last year.

The sharp rise in gold prices proved to be the main contributor to the dramatic 42.9 percent jump to $499.95 for the Five Gold Rings. Typically when the value of the dollar decreases, as it has in the last year, investors buy more gold driving up prices.

The cost of the Seven Swans-a-Swimming, which generally provide the biggest swings from year to year in the PNC CPI, fell this year by 6.3 percent to $5,250 following last year’s eye-opening 33.3 percent rise. As the most volatile item in the Index, the swans are removed to determine the underlying inflation or core PNC CPI, which pushed the rate up 4.8 percent this year.