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Listening Patterns for Sports Talk Station

B

BruceNYC

I listen to WFAN and ESPN New York with some degree of regularity. I find that I can only listen for 20-30 minutes at a time. First of all, there is so much repetition of the topics of the day. I am especially annoyed with callers who constantly speculate on trades. If I tune in later in the day, I hear the same speculations. Also it seems that the commercial load on sports talk stations is very high. I just have to tune out after hearing more than 3 minutes of spots.

Comments?
 
BruceNYC said:
I listen to WFAN and ESPN New York with some degree of regularity. I find that I can only listen for 20-30 minutes at a time.

Comments?
Click to expand...

"You give us 22 minutes..."

It's by design. Some of it is the fact that for most people, their radio usage is about 30 minutes a day. It's all they have time for. Some of it is a finite number of interesting topics to discuss. Some of it is structured around PPM. If you watch similar programming on TV, it's pretty much the same thing. Different talent, different shows, but basically the same topics and the same video over and over.

People use lots of media for short periods. That's the reality. Programming for TSL is a waste. If you're going to commit time, money, and resources to something, make it available to a lot of people, and that means repetition. Just like playing the hits on music radio.

And yes, there are a lot of commercials. Advertisers also know people are using the station for short periods, so they buy lots of spots to make sure they reach people when they listen.
 
We see that repetition not only in radio but TV. It is not rare for a cable TV channel to play a movie over and over or a block of TV shows over and over.

CNN Headline News was on a 30 minute repeat. I recall the rival 'give us 22 minutes, we give you the world'

In Top 40's heyday there were stations with tiny playlists that pretty much repeated everything but the recurrents every 70 minutes. A friend of mine and I were talking about the listening patterns and wondered about a 100% hot hits station that repeated the currents about every 30 or 40 minutes.

I recalled something Todd Storz said: after customers played the same songs over and over all day, the employees, after the customers were gone and they were cleaning up, selected the same songs their customers did on the jukebox to listen to while they cleaned up.

I can see a pattern on talk shows of repeating the same material. Everybody talks about the same topics, host after host, all day into the night.

Sort of off topic, but those of us on air before PPM played the Arbitron clock, taught there are more listeners in the 1st and 3rd quarter hours than in the 2nd and 4th. (and sweeping the quarter hours for that paper credit). Did PPM change that thinking?
 
That sports talk listener wants the top sports topic, right now, not 3 hours from now. Even in a place like Knoxville, TN, if you weren't talking about the football coach firing and soap-opera-like search for a replaceent (which took down an athletic director and chancellor before it was done) every live/local minute, you lost.
 
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