Yes, of course. It can be said of any credible, trusted air person.
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November Ratings
- Thread starter Buddy Shula
- Start date
Live and local talent boosts stations to the upper echelon of the ratings in terrestrial radio. The "compelling content" on satellite and streaming is that they have hundreds of niche formats and ad-free music that some people are willing to pay for. Sirius/XM has about 35-million subscribers spread out over hundreds of formats. Terrestrial radio has more than twice that with far fewer formats. It's the live and local talent that is compelling that's outperforming satellite and streaming. The automated stations that slide down to the bottom of the ratings are simply jukeboxes - like satellite, but free, with ads (maybe).
SOME stations. Not all. Lots of stations with live & local talent that have few listeners. As I said, if all it took was live & local talent, everyone would do it. There was a time when WLKK had live & local talent all day, and it didn't boost them anywhere.
Apples and oranges. Sirius/XM has that many subscribers... about 10% of the population. And it is mostly heard in the car, still. And at any given average time, less than 5% are using the service. We are down to about 1.5 million.
Terrestrial radio reaches 90% of the measured population (6+ or 12+) weekly. That means that there are nearly 300,000,000 terrestrial listeners. Persons Using Radio is around 8% to 9% depending on the market. That means that at that average given moment, there are nearly 30 million terrestrial listeners.
It's a little more than "twice that".
Of late in this thread there's been a bit of talk about air staff...and whether it's live, voice-tracked or off the satellite.
Here's a good example, though it's out of market: Toronto's CHBM(Boom 97.3), which runs a classic hits format. They are live and local weekdays from 5am-midnight, and at least 2 of the names have done radio in Toronto(Maie Pauts in middays and Kris James(aka KJ)in PM drive)for years and are known commodities; a third, morning man Stu Jeffries, is best known to us for hosting the CBC music video show Good Rockin' Tonight back in the day. I don't know the experience of the rest. But they do VERY well ratings wise: the most recent ratings data(late May to late August)puts Boom in the top 5 overall: 9.5 12+, 9.5 for women 25-54 and a 10.1 in men 25-54(full disclosure: that's my demo)and a 9.8 in adults 25-54.
Here's a good example, though it's out of market: Toronto's CHBM(Boom 97.3), which runs a classic hits format. They are live and local weekdays from 5am-midnight, and at least 2 of the names have done radio in Toronto(Maie Pauts in middays and Kris James(aka KJ)in PM drive)for years and are known commodities; a third, morning man Stu Jeffries, is best known to us for hosting the CBC music video show Good Rockin' Tonight back in the day. I don't know the experience of the rest. But they do VERY well ratings wise: the most recent ratings data(late May to late August)puts Boom in the top 5 overall: 9.5 12+, 9.5 for women 25-54 and a 10.1 in men 25-54(full disclosure: that's my demo)and a 9.8 in adults 25-54.
Using Toronto in Canada is like using NYC or LA in the US or London in England...
In fact, Toronto's metro with nearly 17% of the national population is proportionally much larger than New York City's MSA, which has around 5% of the national population.
In another way that Canada is different is if you take the top 6 metros and you have just about half of the entire nation's population.
And in NYC and LA and London and Mexico City and Buenos Aires and, well, all the huge cities with commercial radio, the majority of radio is locally live... although much of it is networked or syndicated to many other markets and stations.
But when you get to Sault St. Marie, ON, or Great Falls, MT, things change.
Exactly, and almost all radio stations in NY & LA have local air staffs.
That is a misleading statement.
What is a fact is that if "Sirius/XM was measured as "one station", the total listening to them in most large, fragmented markets would be in total, greater than that of the #1 rated terrestrial station.
That means that, perhaps, satellite gets around a 5% or 6% share of listening. In LA, the #1 station in 12+ gets just under a 5, and in NYC it is just under a 6 share.
Another way to look at this is that satellite radio is in just over 30 million out of 273 million vehicles registered as "in use" in the USA. That is one out of 9 vehicles. I'll even discount the fact that not every satellite subscriber listens to satellite every time they are in the car or all the time, either. That's 12% of vehicles with satellite.
Less than half of all radio listening is in the car. Let's say there are 50 in-car shares, though. If every one in a vehicle is listening every time they are in the car, then the share of total listening would be about 12% of 50 shares, or 6%.
Yes, satellite radio is #1 in most major markets. But satellite radio does not beat the total of all terrestrial stations combined.
And if you look at significant players in other cities the size of Toronto just in this hemisphere, all of which have ratings, you see the same thing: Mexico City, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, San Francisco, Bogotá, Lima, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro you will see that a similar situation occurs.
In fact, we can say the same for the largest city in nearly any country, from El Salvador to Burkina Faso.
Noted, and I'm not going to disagree.
So let's try a station closer to my home base: CHTZ(97.7 HTZ FM)in St. Catharines, Ont. It's been running an AOR format for YEARS. They're live and local weekdays from 5:30am-11pm. Though the names have changed over the years(in fact, they used to have a Buffalo radio vet-"Iron" Mike Bensson-as part of the air staff), HTZ is a well-known commodity and people STILL tune in because they like the music. (Hell, I wish WBUF took some pointers from HTZ in how to do AOR RIGHT!)
This time I don't disagree. There is one thing to remember, which is that Canada has been far less prone to overpopulating the broadcast bands in the past, only allowing stations when there is a need and economics of the market support additional stations. If you compare the number of facilities in markets like Regina or Winnipeg or Calgary or Halifax with comparably sized ones in the US, you find fewer stations and better facilities.
The US licensed many marginal or inferior facilities as well as too many in total. This put financial pressure on station owners to cut costs as the station counts increased over time while revenues barely kept up with inflation. Overall, while one can find problems with all government regulations, Canada did a much better job at it.
Buffalo and Rochester ratings are dominated by stations that have a significant live and local commitment. In some cases, they're legacy stations and the number of live and local jocks has declined as the "Big Three" have tried to cut their way to profitability. Two have already been through bankruptcy (Citadel/Cumulus more than once), and Entercom certainly seems headed that way if you look at their stock price. The jukeboxes are just "there", mostly as low-rent flankers to protect or nibble at successful stations. It's not just here. The most successful stations have a live and local commitment, whether it's NYC or Dunkirk, NY. Yes, they've got some syndication in dayparts that they've essentially given up on, but the cost of live talent more than pays for itself in most dayparts.
Star 102.5 probably aint going anywhere. But i think they need another personality to put after rob luccas though
Star 102.5 is fine. Their ratings are where they are normally at
If I remember right, the Docket 80-90 rule led to quite a few of those marginal/inferior facilities to sprout up. Rochester's WKGS/106.7 was one of them. For the most part, Buffalo escaped that fate.
Buddy said:
WXRL Classic Country 1300, translator on 95.5 is an interesting station. Not a ratings contender, but a pleasant diversion.
I've never looked at the northern US border in the context of 80-90 (perhaps Scott can comment) but along the Mexican border the international agreement that supplanted NARBA seemed to have minimized the number of possible new facilities there. Of course, Mexico has many large border towns like Laredo, Juárez, Mexicali, Tijuana, Nogales and Reynosa which "sucked up" many channels making them unavailable in the US.
It’s a schizophrenic format. They play more polish than country.
Not true. They are not doing well. They should be ashamed with a 110000 watt signal. Their revenue sucks. That is the station next in line for automation in my opinion
They basically got rid of most of their on air staff
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