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Lowest KUBE ratings ever, in December PPM
- Thread starter crainbebo
- Start date
Sean Ross addresses this with something parallel to my point in today's article:
"Is It Still Groundhog Day At Radio?"
"When PPM measurement took hold, programmers became almost existential about playing the hits. Rotations on powers went up, even as the number of songs deemed power-worthy slowed down. More stations played the same songs and the difference between major formats blurred further. We found that average listening occasions were nine minutes, and our strategy was not to program for longer listening occasions, but to increase TSL with more nine-minute visits."Sean's (and my point) are that faster rotations and fewer and longer stops are very focused on short time spans of listening, and the full day and week are practically ignored. So we have a self-fulfilling prophecy with stations programming for single quarter hour credits and not even looking at hours, days and weeks.
What the PPM revealed is that nobody listened for long spans. No 9 AM to 5 PM workday spans. More like 9:08 to 9:27, 9:41 to 10:18, and so on all day. Little pieces separated by times when radio could not be used. But the fact remained that the person "listened all day" but with normal life interruptions at work and at home.
In the early days of the PPM, Arbitron did presentations all over the country in which they used a station in the San Francisco market as an example because its P1's average over a dozen "incidents" a day listening. They were, in fact, listening all day and they simply had interruptions in their continuous use of the station.
The example station Arbitron used was KBRG and the logs and rotations and the research were all done by someone you know...
The station did rotations to prevent things like AM and PM drive song repeats, and spaced all rotations strategically to fit listening patterns. We found that a slightly longer playlist performed better if we wanted more daily incidents, even though it seemed to cause more tune-outs in shorter time periods.
Read Sean's article. He points out how too big a focus on short listening hurts stations.
The PPM was designed to measure all audio sources, including radio, TV, streams, satellite and the like. It was created by Arbitron in the mid-90s for that purpose, not just radio. In the early test era around 2001-2002, Nielsen came in but later dropped out... only later to buy the whole Arbitron company to acquire the technology.
Because of the multi-media focus of the meter, it will always cover everyone able to carry a meter.
And there are enough ad buys in TV and streaming for younger and older audiences to warrant continuation of the full age spread,
No radio station today targets "kids". There is no revenue.
There are two AC's in Miami, WLYF and WFEZ. Each flanks the other. Both are top billers in the market.
Yes, sometimes a company uses a station to cut into a market leading competitor, but they do it to both bring that other station down and to complete their own array within the market for combo buys.
When it comes to traditional programming and break schedules in a day, I don't disagree with what Sean is saying. But he's taking into account radio listening exclusively, like it's still the only game in town. Sean is not taking into account modern listening habits and all the competition for ears we face today. Are some stations who cram their two or three 5-8min breaks into the second half of the hour to accommodate PPM, trashing longer TSL opportunities? Maybe, but it must be working for them, or I can't imagine they would keep doing it.
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When "true" adults are using audio, they tend to stick with single sources or alternate over longer intervals with just a few changes during the day. That is because the group has other more critical things to do like raising a family, holding a job and the like.
The wildest examples of 5-minute attention spans are within much younger demos where "musical exploration" as well as the phenomenon recently studied of listening to the same song four or five times in a row are common if not prevalent,.
Around three to four decades ago, radio quit serving and targeting those under 18 as the Clearasil and Phisohex ad revenues dried up. The common launch technique of aiming at teens first and then young women died after the launch of the Power Pig in Tampa about 33 years ago. Since then, radio has focused on adult demos, predominantly 25-54 for non-Hispanic whites and 18-49 for Black and Hispanic audiences.
As a sidebar, the predominance of language licensees fear will cause FCC violations in CHR, Churban and CHR format songs has dramatically affected those formats. So it is not due as much to new media usage that such stations have declined as it is the inability to play much of the most wanted songs.
I confess to doing that with my SiriusXM receiver at times. And when listening to my four country presets on the car FM radio, I've been known to listen to the same song on another station (usually joined in progress) as soon as it ends on the previous station if it's a song I really like.
Right, what I said; 70YO white males? What about Millennial's or what's considered middle age? There's a reason why Spotify inked a $100M deal with Joe Rogan. Its to have access to the 11M 18-50M demo that listens to his podcast. A demo that isn't listening to a single radio station all day.
It's what we see today as a typical TikTok consumer. They aren't listening, nor will be listening to a single radio station in a day, let alone a year.
Hopefully so did their acne: Welcome to Instant Rimshot
True, because other than riding in Mom's minivan, teens don't actively seek out radio. But teens have become adults who have been exposed to music and information from different sources than radio. Do you think programming radio same as the days where teens grew up into adults with radio is still a good strategy? Or does one program radio for existing adults until your audience eventually ages-out? Then what?
Sure, and both of us know the main reason for this: CHR/pop language can be unacceptable for use on broadcast radio. Teens/young adults can hear unedited versions from their smartphone playlist, or streamed.
You don't program to a device, you program to an audience. So it doesn't matter how people hear something.
People will seek out whatever gets them what they want to hear in the easiest way and at the cheapest price.
Me too.
How is that even possible? Are all 4 of those FM stations somehow correlating with one another?
I didn't know I needed this so badly, thanks for posting this website! Also, LOL "priceiswrong" and "wilheim scream"
Not as far as I know. But they're all playing the hottest hits on their current playlists in the same slots on their rotation clocks. And no more than two of them are ever in commercial sets at the same time, so the exact time the monster hits air can vary by a few minutes. Hence, I listen to Chris Stapleton's "You Should Probably Leave" on 100.5, punch a preset button when it ends and hear Chris in full voice on 95.3. Never been able to do this with more than two stations, though.
Totally agree, you program to a listener. The difference is; modern listeners don't just listen to radio, so there are contrasting differences.
Agree here too. And that's why I'm convinced that clustering longer breaks into the second half of an hour becomes a necessary evil, considering the way PPM works. You do what works best for the situation.
I'm amused at all the discussion about how to program music and spots when we are on a thread about a sports station.
They've listened to multiple devices for over 50 years. This isn't something new.
If anything, they might either move it down the dial to 106.1 or end up In Sacramento now that they won the bid for the 107.9 frequency in the market.
I'm talking about 25 and over... the ages where people have jobs, form family units and find other priorities beyond spending the whole day bouncing around the web.
Yes, many people in that group find interesting podcasts but research tends to show that this cuts into TV viewing more than radio usage. In fact, it is the "talk radio" of most people under 50. And since podcasts are not music based due to the costs, what we have here is competition for other spoken word offerings.
The fact is that just over 90% of all 25+ and 25-54 use radio. That is down only about 4% since 1985. They use it less, but in the national averages over half of the lost in a comparison to 1995 is due to the PPM, which cut radio TSL by 40% due to precision measurement.
In the 25+ demos, usage of active engagement apps falls once a person has a job and a family and far less leisure time. "Honey, take out the trash" is a new priority.
Much of radio's appeal to adults is that it is prefabricated for them. No work, and is a good companion rather than a work intensive seeking of the right song at the right moment.
Back in the days when video games were emerging, we found teen usage of radio declined as more and more game units were sold. Yet the popularity of the iPod did not have a big radio impact... it was just the transformation from 45's to 8-tracks to cassettes and Wlkmans to DVDs to digital devices.
Agreed. And that has more to do with teen and very young adult usage of streaming than anything else today. We are seeing that in Spanish speaking Latin America where Puerto Rican reggaetón has taken over the CHR stations almost entirely but where in many nations language is regulated.
Some audience comparisons done by the Spanish PRISA group (owners or operators in about 10 Latin American nations) shows that in the more restrictive nations, usage of radio by the under-21 group is much less than in nations where there is tolerance for the songs with very strong lyrics. That is about the best proof that radio usage is more affected by lyrics than anything else.
The devices just get easier and cheaper... and smaller.
Is language a problem in reggaeton? Does the FCC care if naughty language airs on its licensed stations if the profanities aren't in English?
That is not true, though. Extensive inspection of PPM data going back two decades (to the original Philly testing) shows that start and end times of listening are pretty much equal in every minute of the hour in every hour of the day.
Listening is triggered by opportunity. You get to work, turn it off... with no way to continue. You are at work and get a phone call or have to get out of the truck to make a delivery or have to go to the bathroom or go to lunch, you stop listening. Most of those events are very random when you look at thousands of meters across 48 markets.
So spot clustering is done at the transition points between quarter hours, either doing it around :00 and :30 or :15 and :45.
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