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Did PPM kill KKSF?

stewie said:
Did Nielsen Kill The Radio Star? This article talks about KKSF and other "Smooth Jazz" stations that died a slow death after the introduction of PPM.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...he-radio-star/
Click to expand...

The link does not work.

But in any case, it was not the PPM that killed the format.

Smooth Jazz had been aging badly since even prior to 2000. By the 2008 introduction of the PPM methodology in most of the top 50 markets, it was very much a 55+ format. What kept it alive was the enormous TSL the stations got, producing still impressive share levels in many markets.

But the PPM showed that people had been writing down exaggerated listening times in the diary... such as "9 AM to 5 PM" workday entries. The PPM showed that instead of 8 hours, that listener truly listened for perhaps no more than 3 hours in little slices interrupted with lunch breaks, other breaks, time on the phone, time away from the work location, bathroom breaks, etc.

Just think of a delivery driver with a radio. They would put down the whole workday in the diary, but in truth, 75% of the time they were out of the truck delivering packages. Or an office worker who gets phone calls, goes to other people's offices, takes the normal breaks, attends meetings and such.

The PPM exposed the fact that Smooth Jazz was not only continuing to be more and more a 55+ format but that listening levels were considerably lower than thought. While small shares are still salable in larger markets, a 55 and older audience is not.
 
That Voltair unit has been getting a lot of talk lately - as the article mentions. I think a lot of this has to do with where the PPM data is inserted in the audio chain. It's generally accepted that you get more transmissions of your embedded data if you put the boxes after the AGC/limiter, but that's not possible in a lot of audio chains.

When I first read the title I was thinking of the other KKSF - the talk station. The PPM truly did kill KGO, although it's not known exactly why.

Dave B.
 
DaveBayArea said:
When I first read the title I was thinking of the other KKSF - the talk station. The PPM truly did kill KGO, although it's not known exactly why.
.
Click to expand...

KGO "died" from the same causes as Smooth Jazz, with an added secret ingredient.

KGO saw its demos getting older as the new Millennium got underway. But management, obviously well entrenched due to the decades of success of the KGO operation, did not recognize that there was a need to update the format, the talent and the presentation.

The PPM hit in 2008, and the already older audience was shown to be listening in smaller bits and pieces and the TSL was revealed to be lower than in the diary.

The big difference is that the PPM only measures TSL and cume. The diary measures TSL, cume and memory. KGO listeners thought they had listened "all day long" or "all morning" when in fact they weren't even near a radio for half or more of those times. While many music stations got a big cume increase when the PPM rolled out, and talk stations generally did not.
 
I'm not sure about other markets, but in the Bay Area on KKSF, the "Smooth Jazz" format had been heavily watered down by the time the station went off the air. IIRC, about half of the play list had become Old School soul music. This probably extended KKSF's lifespan, if anything, but it was repetition of half the playlist of the soft rock and classic hits stations.

Anybody who misses Smooth Jazz can stream the format from about a dozen sources now, and that's without Marvin Gaye and Al Green.
 
DavidEduardo said:

The big difference is that the PPM only measures TSL and cume. The diary measures TSL, cume and memory. KGO listeners thought they had listened "all day long" or "all morning" when in fact they weren't even near a radio for half or more of those times. While many music stations got a big cume increase when the PPM rolled out, and talk stations generally did not.
Click to expand...

No argument there, but what I was referring to was mainly the drastic change in KGO ratings between the diary and PPM. That drop in audience share meant something had to be done. I have no doubt that KGO received favorable treatment in the diaries due to inaccurate reporting. But their drop was huge - from #1 or #2 to something like #18 IIRC. I would not be surprised if there were inaccuracies in the PPM system - especially in the early days. The recent Voltare experience seems to at least question the PPM's accuracy for some formats.

BTW - I used google to figure out the URL, but it got truncated. See if this works:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/did-nielsen-kill-the-radio-star/

Dave B.
 
DaveBayArea said:
No argument there, but what I was referring to was mainly the drastic change in KGO ratings between the diary and PPM. That drop in audience share meant something had to be done. I have no doubt that KGO received favorable treatment in the diaries due to inaccurate reporting. But their drop was huge - from #1 or #2 to something like #18 IIRC. I would not be surprised if there were inaccuracies in the PPM system - especially in the early days. The recent Voltare experience seems to at least question the PPM's accuracy for some formats.
Click to expand...

What the PPM did in the case of KGO is accurately quantify the time listeners spent with KGO. Like many talk stations, people would write down the equivalent of listening to a whole show. For example, someone who liked Ronn Owens would put down a start time that was the show start time and an end time that was the same as the end of the show, when they really only listened for a total of 45 minutes or so during the show. So the TSL fell dramatically because the PPM accurately reported the real listening incidents.

In the Spring 2008 diary book, KGO was 12th in 25-54 with a cume of 230,000 and a share of 2.7. In the first PPM book which was July of 2008, KGO was 18th in 25-54 with 235,000 cume and a share of 2.3. Most illuminating is the TSL: in the diary, KGO had 6:00 hours per week average, while in the PPM it was 3:15, a fall of about 45% based on more accurate measurement of listening times.

But in share in the sales demo, KGO was already out of the top 10 in 25-54 and falling. When the PPM was released, they maintained the cume, but the lower TSL and the ongoing decline in 25-54 listening and the fact that it was summertime all took the station down a bit more. Micky (the GM) and Mickey (the Mouse) blamed the PPM but that was just an effort to mask the ongoing decline of an old-line talker that had not upped its game.

And, no, I don't think I would have done much better were it my call. For a number of formats and stations, the PPM was just another nudge towards the edge of the cliff.
 
DaveBayArea said:
BTW - I used google to figure out the URL, but it got truncated. See if this works:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/did-nielsen-kill-the-radio-star/

Dave B.
Click to expand...

It's wonderful how a skyscraper can be built on a single false premise.

The article starts, "At the start of 2008, everything was going well at Chicago’s WNUA 95.5-FM. The smooth-jazz station ranked in the top five in the city in listeners age 25 to 54"

Now the reality.

Diary Book: Chicago
Period: Spring 2008
Demo: 25-54
WNUA Rank: 13th (2.7) and declining.

The article says they were 5th. They were not.

In Spring 2007, long before the PPM, they were 8th in 25-54.

In Spring 2006, they were 12th in 25-54.

Again, the PPM just showed another step in the decline in sales demos of WNUA. But the problem was with the format, not the PPM.
 
I was hoping that article would stir up some chatter and it did. :)

Agree with others about KGO. They didn't do anything to continue to make themselves relevant. If they had "freshened up", hired new and younger talent and added an FM simulcast (I realize this might not have been an option), would things be different?
 
KWJZ suffered the same fate in Seattle. They were #1 (or close to it) for years in the Seattle-Tacoma market, pre PPM. When Seattle started using PPM, it fell significantly into the 2's. By the end of 2010, it was gone. KLCK (Modern Music Click 98.9) is still suffering like KWJZ did, with 2's (and even a 1.8 one time this year). I'm one of the few that stays on with smooth jazz. Yes, I know that it's a 55+ format, but it relaxes me.

-crainbebo
 
crainbebo said:
KWJZ suffered the same fate in Seattle. They were #1 (or close to it) for years in the Seattle-Tacoma market, pre PPM. When Seattle started using PPM, it fell significantly into the 2's. By the end of 2010, it was gone.
Click to expand...

That's just not true.

The PPM came to Seattle after the Fall diary book of 2009. At that time, the PPM had only rolled out in markets 1 to 11. Seattle, then ranked 13th, was not yet converted to PPM

In the last diary book before the PPM started, Fall of 2009, KWJZ had a 2.6 in 12+ and was 16th. In 25-54 it was ranked 20th.

So you see that the station was in "the twos" before the PPM even began to be used in Seattle.

Three books before, in Spring of 2008 KWJZ had a 3.3 and was 9th in 12+ and 7th in 25-54. It was 15th in 18-49, showing that a huge percentage of the audience was over 50, and the station was aging fast.

Going back to Spring of 2004, they were at a 3.9 in 12+ and ranked 10th, while in 15-54 they were 8th.

In fact, I went all the way back to 1998 and found the station was 12th in 12+ and 8th in 25-54.

So in the12 years before PPM (and I looked at all the rest just as you can at http://www.americanradiohistory.com/RandR-Ratings-Directories.htm) the station was nowhere near #1 in the market as you state. The closest it got was in the 2002-2003 period, where it was up in the top 5 in 25-54, although still around 9th or 10th in 12+.

So really, the station failed because it started slipping 7 to 8 years before the PPM arrived and by 2010 the remaining 25-54 audience had gotten so small that they were forced to find something else.
 
Last edited:
I should like to opine, given David's last three posts -- all of which cite data that directly contradicted statements made by other posters who thought they "knew" the facts -- that with the easy access to old ratings data that is now available it is no longer a good idea to post statements like those without checking first.

This goes for just about anything that can be checked online. I know from personal experience in using David's site for research how much cold, hard fact is available there. And David makes it all available free of charge out of the goodness of his heart and his desire to both preserve history and keep it accessible.

There is no reason for people to make themselves look uninformed when it is so simple to look things up while writing a post and look very well-informed.
 
Everyone is looking to blame something for the "death" of smooth jazz, but as I said in another forum, the music was tired, old, and stale by the time the format kicked. Stations began adding other genres into the mix in an attempt to add some life, and break up the monotony. I think the additional genres helped prolong the format at least another ten years. But it was dead musically a long time ago. The audiences weren't attending jazz festivals either. Smooth jazz records weren't selling. All of the indicators one would look at to determine the health of a genre were pointing down at least ten years ago, long before PPM. Today, even public non-commercial stations are dropping jazz from their stations, and they don't care about PPM or demographics. If it can't survive in the non-commercial world, it's in real trouble. So don't blame PPM when the real problem is the music itself.
 
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