Any thoughts
https://ratings.****************/content/arb001
https://ratings.****************/content/arb001
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New york radio ratings
- Thread starter CassChopper96
- Start date
Another COVID-19 book, but news listening is markedly down. Should we chalk this up to listener burnout and a desire for musical escape, or the pandemic lifestyle already becoming a new normal?
This covers April 23 to May 20. George Floyd was killed on May 25. So these numbers are the tail end of the virus period, as the president stopped doing his daily briefings. So that's the context of what you see.
This analysis indicates that some cume returned during this time. Not enough to replace the 40% loss in April, but we seem to be turning the corner:
https://www.allaccess.com/net-news/...rch-director-inc-exclusive-may-ppm-analysis-f
This analysis indicates that some cume returned during this time. Not enough to replace the 40% loss in April, but we seem to be turning the corner:
https://www.allaccess.com/net-news/...rch-director-inc-exclusive-may-ppm-analysis-f
Only 3 out of the top 24 stations in NYC are Spanish. That's 12.5% of the stations in a market that's 25% Spanish. Of course they are going to have disproportionately high shares. And if WSKQ's lead weren't already wide enough add another 0.7 share for its steam, one of only three streams to appear at all in the published NYC 6+ ratings.
I've said it before, there aren't enough full-market commercial frequencies in New York, made worse by the loss of 95.5.
I've said it before, there aren't enough full-market commercial frequencies in New York, made worse by the loss of 95.5.
If you added one more, all it would do is dilute the shares the other stations get. What we're seeing in all major markets is the narrowing of viable musical genres, to the point where you only need five or six radio stations to cover the music that people want to hear. The sad part is we see no leadership in the music industry to grow things beyond the handful of genres that are making money.
I would argue we need more vision in the radio industry to cover the huge tapestry of genres that already exist, and to do it well, and then maybe the music industry would have some incentive to grow.
Radio wasn't always a taste chaser, it used to be a formidable taste maker and the music industry responded. The radio business has a storied history of visionaries who made it an artistic outlet that influenced generations. Today it's almost exclusively driven by bankers who only know how to pander to an audience of the lowest common denominator defined by a research spreadsheet.
The yin-yang balance of art and business has been demolished by the consolidated Wall Street behemoths who only know one symbol, the almighty dollar sign. These are people with zero passion for the business they are involved in. It doesn't matter to them what's on the air as long as they make their quarterly bonus. The people who promote this attitude must be blind (or deaf) to what made radio special in the first place. No wonder listening has fallen off a cliff. You can't blame it all on technology, it's the result of the destruction of the product that's been a long time coming.
There are a number of formats that are not currently on the air in North America's biggest city. We need more stations, not 6.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Radio didn't create rock & rock or smooth jazz. All it did was take it and give it a platform. The music had to be there first. The music attracted the audience that radio wanted to reach. That's how it works. Tom Donohue felt KYA was missing a lot of music being made in San Francisco. So he gave it a platform on KMPX and later KSAN. But the MUSIC had to be there first. I'm not seeing that now. You can list all the negatives about the radio industry, and I can match you one for one with what's going on now in the music business. Total lack of vision, lack of investment, and lack of courage.
Yes there are a number of formats not on the radio, but that's because the music isn't being promoted the way it was 30 years ago. It's up to the labels to create the excitement. Otherwise you have WFMU and other educational stations playing a bunch of music that no one knows.
I owned my first Top 40 station in 1964... more than a decade after the format began, but still when it was fresh.
We were the first Top 40 in not just our city, but in our country and, amazingly, on our continent.
But we did not "make taste". Top 40 and its underlying pop music was simply something that the young generations wanted then. People wanted that new kind of music they saw in movies (we had no TV yet) and bought on trips or in import stores.
We quickly found that there was a slightly different blend of Top 40 that worked in our market and "filtered" the new adds (which were all imported) for that taste and then refined the playlist based on phone requests and a "listener panel".
We followed the taste of listeners. It was always changing and mutating, and we had a major job trying to keep up. But, even with a hugely #1 radio station, we were always following the listeners, not leading.
Whenever anybody tells me that radio in the 60s was better, and knew the hits better than they do now, I remind them of how many times The Beatles tried to get their music played on the radio BEFORE 1964. Capitol owned the rights to their music, and wouldn't release it in the US. Several small indie labels released the songs first, and they got limited airplay. Then they went on Ed Sullivan, and the rest is history. Radio just coasted along for the ride.
New York City is less than 0.1% Spanish.
Unless you mean people from Spain, Spanish is a language, not a format.
In nearly all markets with mostly "new" Hispanic populations, the total Spanish language shares are around 40% to 50% of the Hispanic population percentage. LA, for example, is 43% Hispanic and there are aroung 21 to 22 Hispanic shares in 12+.
The real issue is that when there are more stations, nearly none make money. Look at Albuquerque of Grand Junction or Boise or Tucson...
My mistake, I meant Hispanic. The statistics given by Nielsen for NYC...
Population: 16,458,200
Black: 2,782,200 (17%)
Hispanic: 4,080,900 (25%)
Weird, how long have those stations been in business? Every business I've known that doesn't make money closes up or goes bankrupt before that long.
Remember, Nielsen numbers are either 6+ or 12+, not the whole population. And the MSA to Nielsen is the Metro Survey Area, not the government's "Metropolitan Statistical Area". Radio metros are defined by radio use and commuting, while the criteria for government metros is more based on commerce.
Docket 80-90 ruined many medium and small markets because station counts in some cases doubled while revenue stayed the same.
Stations have been saved by consolidation, and now even some of the consolidators are failing.
Ah, so i think what you're saying is that the stations in those markets actually do make money as evidenced by the fact that they continue to do business and have not been closed or sold despite the market pie being divided up into more pieces. They just don't make *as much* money as the wealthy bankers who own them would like.
Anyway, New York is not a small city like those markets. I'm sure it could support the missing formats if there were dial positions available, and the will to put them on the air. Maybe more pieces of the pie wouldn't be such a bad thing. For listeners anyway.
As I said those formats are being addressed by the numerous non-commercial stations in the area. That's the proper place for radio that takes chances. If only the public would support the radio stations that are willing to take those chances and have that passion for what they do.
Non-commercial radio is not playing Active Rock, Variety Hits or Soft AC, all formats that immediately spring to mind as missing from the NYC market. There are more, but there's no place on the commercial dial for more formats in New York, a city that could surely support them. That was my original point.
Those are all commercial formats. If there was money to be made with them, there are frequencies available. They've been tried and failed. Commercial radio is NOT in the format or music business. If a record label or artist or someone with interest in those formats wanted to start a radio station in NYC, they COULD have bought WPLJ. But they didn't so it went to EMF. There is no law that a radio station has to be owned by Entercom or iHeart. Stevie Wonder owns a commercial radio station in LA. Is he the only one with real passion? Maybe he is.
Forgot to mention that the real problem isn't the lack of frequency. The real problem is ownership limits prevent the only companies that might try those formats from owning another frequency. So if you can get the FCC to loosen ownership limits, iHeart or Entercom would gladly buy another FM. But they can't, and that's another reason why you hear Christian music on WPLJ.
Active rock: way too thin a potential audience base. In the PPM world, cume wins. Lack of PPM cume killed Smooth Jazz as one example.
Variety Hits: its best use is to fill a demographic gap for a cluster. As a stand-alone, it is a hard sell.
Soft AC: it is mostly a 55 and over format. Kiss of death or a wooden stake in the heart for an agency driven market like NYC. You may not know that the Soft AC in Chicago has a power ratio of about 0.2 and is just not getting the "big" buys.
None of those are formats that would garner donations for a non-commercial station.
Again we get endless reasons given why perfectly valid formats "can't work" in New York, a market of 16 million, viewed through the microscope of money and not diversity. I don't buy it. Those stations would probably not be #1 in the market but they would each have an audience. Does every station have to be number one with the same audience or should there be something for everyone in the media landscape? You need only look at your own words to see why interest in radio has evaporated.
Then again, the point is moot because there's no place on the NYC commercial dial for any of these formats, circling back to the original point again. 95.5 which was a lousy, failing station for years, had the greatest potential to fill one of those roles before Cumulus dumped it. Now it's a religious NCE station in the middle of the dial with a 1 share at best that will not be in play for a very long time.
Then again, the point is moot because there's no place on the NYC commercial dial for any of these formats, circling back to the original point again. 95.5 which was a lousy, failing station for years, had the greatest potential to fill one of those roles before Cumulus dumped it. Now it's a religious NCE station in the middle of the dial with a 1 share at best that will not be in play for a very long time.
It wasn't dumped because of the format. It was dumped because it was losing money. They could have changed format, but that wouldn't have changed the situation. And several other companies have failed in NYC, not just Cumulus. You can believe whatever you want to believe, but it's not easy to make money running radio stations. Especially in NYC.
If WBAI became available tomorrow, who would buy it? Google? Amazon? Apple? Really? They're the only ones with deep pockets.
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