amfmxm said:
Uh... this kind of "research" is an engraved invitation for clever/unscrupulous competitors-and-or-pranksters to throw these dudes down a path of self-destruction via an organized "input campaign" pointing to artists and tunes that fall somewhere within the range of format acceptability but... uh... may be among the poorer testing segment. Ya know?
I'm not sure if anybody can get away of doing such a thing without making a huge stink-- lawsuits included. You can hardly prank a competing station these days, unfortunately.
There's a battle going to court right now in Fresno for something silly. A month before KYNO-AM 1300 switched to news/talk, their competition at KMJ-AM 580 registered the web domain name (also known as "cybersquatting"):
kyno1300.com. Get this-- the page lead to KMJ's homepage!
Clever, or what? But while I think it's a simple case of "you snooze, you lose", and unpreparedness, fact is that it is going to court. An "organized input campaign" like you mentioned, if involving a Valley radio station, will probably end up being bad news for both parties.
Furthermore, these radio stations using "Survey Monkey" for the cheap, easy, and amateur/nonprofessional ways to get research done is growing-- a growing problem. KOOL is doing a listener survey as well, though it's not as blatant as KEDJ's. You can find the KOOL listener survey tucked-away in your At Work Rewards account. In both cases, I hope the results are taken with a grain of salt to feed curiosity. I've noticed serious issues with questions, the way they're worded, and the options given for answers. There are also basic, personal questions about you, the listener, that are missed in all of the surveys I've seen.
Invest in real research.