This is the final segment of my blog post about building a streaming radio station. Part 1 can be found here, and part 2 can be found here.

Streaming Analytics

The station was just about ready to launch. Just one part was missing – analytics. It’s difficult to keep track of analytics for streaming audio simply due to the nature of the content. I couldn’t find an existing solution that fit my needs, so I built my own.

I was only majorly concerned with a few different metrics – namely, how many people were listening, what they listened to, and how long they listened. I added a new table to the MySQL database that the rest of the site had been running on to keep track of these metrics. In the player’s check-in process, I added an include for a script which would register analytics. This script would add or update a row for that particular session (identified by PHP session ID) which stored:

• Timestamps for the first and most recent check-ins
• The first and most recently listened to songs
• The number of seconds of music that were streamed

It wasn’t possible to derive the length of time the user was actually listening from the start and end times, as the player wouldn’t check in if the stream was paused. However, I of course knew that the player checked in every five seconds, so I could use this to get a fairly close approximation of how much audio was actually streamed.

Between now and the time that I started writing this series of blog posts, I unfortunately had to take stkbuzz down entirely. However, I do intend on making the previously mentioned Python script open source soon – I’d hate to see it go to waste!