Buckethead said:
Maybe it's just laziness on Arbitron's part, but it seems too high a premium on the multi-member households.
There is no premium on multi-member households / dwelling units. The proportion of single member households in the market should be in accordance with the proportion in the sample.
The 30-40 year old single professionals with a higher disposable income are systematically discarded from the start.
In LA, with 12-39 being over 50% Hispanic, the percentage of over-30's in a single household is likely very small, and of itself not a significant factor in radio ratings.
Most of my friends are single upper income professionals with no children.
As has been pointed out, you are discussing your group of friends, not the universe in LA. If we use our personal anecdotal evidence, all surveys would be wrong. I, for example, can't think of one 30-something who lives alone now or in the recent past, save for the occasional temporarily un-partnered person who fairly quickly remedied that situation. Yet I know they exist; they even do sitcoms about them!
None of them listen to KISS FM.
Kiss-FM is targeted at 18-34 females, and probably does not even consider the group you speak of in that it is likely not mainstream in LA, and likely an area where rather eclectic or, at lest, non-mainstream tastes are prevalent.
Their tastes are not reflected by the PPM.
If you read from the bottom up, they certainly are.
And Arbitron is not interested in measuring a single member household. A house full of kids and teens and young 20's, well KISS FM makes sense, and a houseful of people is what Arbitron wants to measure.
"Household" and "dwelling unit" are used together or "dwelling unit" is used alone. Perhaps it is my error in using the easier-to-type "household" predominantly. In any case, the definition is simply a place where one or more people resides, and that is what Arbitron seeks. In fact, for panel administration, a single person is easier to manage as individual behaviour does not cause a whole group of people to be cut from the panel as it would in a multi-person unit.
When I spoke about recruitment being at the household / dwelling unit level, that does not exclude single member "families" or dwelling unit occupants. The point is that everyone living in a unit, whether 1 or 15, must participate or nobody participates... all recruitment is based on "everyone who is there" and a single individual at a multi-person household / du will not be recruited alone.
KUSC is doing well because it makes good background music at stores and in homes where mommies are trying to get their babies to take a nap. Huge TSL.
Among 18-49, where the mom's of babies would virtually all be, KUSC ranks 52nd in TSL. That's about 40% below the median TSL.
Its not about what people are listening to, it's about what people are carrying meters.
It's always been about the participant in ratings, whether metered or holding a diary or the recipient of a phone call or a knock on the door, going back to the 30's.
I am however encouraged by the GeoZones effort.
That has been a major flaw in the past where a station does not show up at all in certain zip codes where they do in fact have listeners.
A zone does not guarantee that any individual ZIP code will have meters, although groups of ZIPs with comparable characteristics (ethnicity, age distribution, income / property values, etc.) will be grouped to form zones. with 3000 meters, at about 3 to 4 per household (whatever the average is) there are more ZIPs than dwelling units sampled, so some ZIPs will have zero measurement.
