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SAN FRANCISCO Ratings 1966-1973

Huff

Huff

Administrator
Staff member
I am looking for anyone who might have squirreled away old ARB books from 1966 thru 1973 - or anyone who knows anyone who might have them. My attempts to fully document the history of the market's listening have been futile as even the Arbitron archive itself (at the Univ. of Georgia Library) is missing most of San Francisco from this period. Scouring archived newspapers has yielded no info either.

Any information or leads provided here would be greatly appreciated!
 
I have exhausted all available online sources. Billboard did not publish Arbitron market summaries until the early 80s (there were occasional articles that would mention a station or two here or there before that.)

R&R started printing market summaries in 1975. Duncan's American Radio started publication the following year. So I've only been able to go back to 1975 through conventional means.

PS - David Gleason's americanradiohistory.com now has all Billboards in a format that is more easily searched than those on Google Books.
 
Starting in 1970, TV/Radio Age printed the Arbitron top 5 stations based on quarter hour share and the top 5 cume.

So you could at least see how some of the big stations like KGO, KCBS and KFRC did during those years.
 
briancraig said:
Starting in 1970, TV/Radio Age printed the Arbitron top 5 stations based on quarter hour share and the top 5 cume.

So you could at least see how some of the big stations like KGO, KCBS and KFRC did during those years.
Click to expand...

The problem is where to find TV/Radio Age. I have been trying to fill in the years I need for my website for half a decade at least, and can't find a source for either buying or borrowing the volumes. I've even offered a "finder's fee" of $500 to anyone who can locate a buy or borrow source, to no avail.

Do you know of a source?
 
briancraig said:
Starting in 1970, TV/Radio Age printed the Arbitron top 5 stations based on quarter hour share and the top 5 cume.

So you could at least see how some of the big stations like KGO, KCBS and KFRC did during those years.
Click to expand...

I have copies of all of those articles from TV/Radio Age (Southern Methodist Univ. has a complete run as well.) Unfortunately only seeing the top 5 stations doesn't paint a very complete picture. Additionally, San Francisco was one of only 8 markets being rated four times a year in the early 70s, and TV/Radio Age only ran their compilations for the Apr/May and Oct/Nov books.
 
briancraig said:
Anoter place to try is the University of Georgia Library. Arbitron's archives are held there.

http://www.libs.uga.edu/assessment/askaquestion/arbitron.html
Click to expand...

Thanks Brian. They know me by name in Athens as I have been ordering copies of data from them for almost a decade now (and have spent more money in the process than I care to admit.) Unfortunately San Francisco is one of the handful of markets for which many books are missing from the archives. Hence the reason for my original post, only 8 out of 39 books for the market issued between 1966 and 1976 are in the archives, the library has no idea what happened to the other 31. Perhaps someone, somewhere has some of them stashed away - I can only hope.
 
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