Yes I heard stories like that before where political candidates from other parts of the USA goes to San Francisco and Sacramento for superpac, and lobbyist donor money. Yes this is given that Downtown Sacramento has some of the west coast branches of Super PACs + lobbying firms are located and San Francisco is where the investment + VC firms are located.
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A Change Coming to KGO
- Thread starter atthestars
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I'm afraid to ask how you know this!
No nefarious surveillance! She's home for the weekend (and for my dad's funeral next week) and I asked her.
There's a pretty big spread between someone who born in the early 2000s (like your daughter) and someone who is born in the late 80s (like my younger siblings). I imagine your daughter is more likely to be the outlier among her friends, simply because of your profession.
Your daughter never knew a time that you couldn't have a thousand songs in your pocket, on-demand (either via an iPod or streaming). Someone born in the late 80s probably still remembers making mix tapes and mix CDs or using Napster and waiting an hour for a song to download via dial-up modem.
I agree with the idea that Nielsen is not adequately getting young people on their panel, especially young people who live independent of older relatives. This will skew any results they publish. IMO the reason is easy: when Nielsen reaches out and says "we're a TV & radio research company," the prospective members of the ratings panel ignore further communication, because that is about as relevant to them as an advertisement for a retirement home.
Who's paying all her subscription bills? I think I know. Not her. What we find is there are a lot of people her age who aren't in college, who are responsible for their own expenses, and those are the people who use more traditional media.
But yes, the eclectic music mix is why it's becoming increasingly difficult to program music on radio stations, because music taste is so individual (even when it's within the same genre). It's also very deep. I'm always surprised how people in their 20s know rock songs from the 70s as though they're currents. Everyone knows Sweet Home Alabama.
Remember, Nielsen is not a "radio & TV research company". It is a "consumer research company". The media research division measures what people watch and hear.
You don't have to be a radio listener to be on the PPM panel. You simply have to be in a particular market they measure.
The panel is stratified by over 20 things, such as age, gender, race or ethnicity, geogrtapy, income, education, dwelling unit occupants, etc.
What they don't get are transitory people, such as college students who will not be in the same market for up to two years.
So they don't recruit "radio listeners" and never have. They recruit people. Even back in the pre-Internet diary days, a diary review showed about one out of every 19 to 20 people did not listen to radio at all.
Whew! But really, with your connections in the business, couldn't you have found some sort of meter for her to wear? You know how people are about remembering listening/viewing habits as compared with what technology reveals about their actual listening/viewing, right?
Would be interesting to know. Of course, one can not volunteer for a PPM and Rochester is not a PPM market... and anyone with media affiliations is disqualified.
But your point is strong: Younger people don't listen a lot... or at all... by choice. But they hear radio that other people have selected and that they hear and that is a significant part of what registers in PPM markets.
I do! But she's pretty self-aware of what she's consuming (and relentlessly critical of her old man, in the way that only a teenager can be.)
She actually doesn't consume that much paid content. The Apple Music came with her phone, which she paid for partially with summer work. The YT content is ad supported. If she has a paid Spotify account, we're not the ones paying for it.
In all, there's a lot less cash outlay for her music/media consumption than I was spending at her age in the early 90s buying CDs with abandon.
I'll ask her to be aware of that when she goes back downstate in a week.
My guess is that she's not hearing that much radio that way, either... she takes the subway back and forth to class and my impression is that her Bluetooth headphones are on pretty much the whole time she's anywhere between dorm and class. So yeah, there might be a radio on in the bodega, but it's not reaching her ears in any meaningful way.
And that even assumes the bodega or wherever else has a radio on. My recent experiences in the city have found otherwise.
Immoral?
That's a fascinating take.
But let's just go with the practical for now. If---IF---we were to suddenly limit campaign contributions to the people who would be represented by the candidate involved (be that city, county, congressional district or senate), that would put candidates who live in places with fewer and less well-off people at a significant disadvantage when it comes to funding a campaign.
What's the solution?
This is not that. The Chronicle piece is about private donations to Senate campaigns, which are capped at $100.
Personal experience here in the Upper Valley (VT/NH) is that chain and local convenience stores, mom-and-pop shops and even some restaurants are still using radio, usually one of the country stations. (Several times while it was on the chart, I heard Dustin Lynch and Mackenzie Porter's "Thinking 'Bout You," which mentions Circle K in its first verse, while waiting in line at the Circle K!) Of course, the supermarkets and chain pharmacies have proprietary, piped-in music of the expected bland variety.
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This gets back to what I said earlier in this thread. Based on my market observations, I believe traditional radio usage in San Francisco is lower than a lot of other places. Especially among younger people. Same with Seattle. If you look at the stations people listen to, the Top 10 is different from other major markets.
OMG, thinking back to when I was a high school dropout at age 18, the record companies brought me everything they produced and then pestered me to no end about playing the stuff. That makes me realize that I did not experience that part of life "normally" and so I can't quite relate.
(And, having learned from the experience of having people call me "ignorant drop-out", I later qualified for college admission while I was consulting stations and actually made the Dean's List all the time... but because I split majors between business, sociology, math and electronic engineering, I was not eligible for a degree. I'm a severe critic of the rigid structure of formal education, particularly its inability to deal with people with different learning methods... which they call "disabilities")
Amen to that, Scott! A $14.95 monthly Apple Music subscription beats $100 every paycheck at Tower Records hands-down.
San Franciscans have no reason to influence elections in Vermont!
I wasn't that much older than Ari is now when I started working for pay in radio, but it was always at news stations, so I never had David's experience of getting freebies from the record companies. So a lot of money went straight from Westinghouse through my wallet over to Tower, Newbury Comics and HMV every week!
Promo copies will alter your expectations.
I bought records with allowance money from age 11 through 15. From 15 through 25, getting a promo copy for my own listening saved a chunk of change, though I'd still buy older albums that I wanted in my collection.
After 25, when I went to news, it was all out-of-pocket, and from 28 until kids came along at 35, a lot of it was buying CDs instead of vinyl.
Having exactly one incomplete semester of college to my name, I felt insecure for a while, especially in journalism.
Then I found Peter Jennings, then anchor of ABC's World News Tonight, was not only a drop-out, but a high school drop-out who had dropped out because he'd flunked tenth grade.
I'm all for higher education, but it's not the ultimate litmus test of anyone's intelligence, worth or ability to learn.
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