Since PPM began rolling out, I have not seen so many mistaken beliefs about ratings as are contained in this post.
Bill Harmonic said:
PPM changed the way radio is created based on the idea that it's no longer how long a person listens but who they listen to and how many times they come back.
The two components of a station's ratings in both the diary and the PPM methodologies are the number of people who listen to a station (cume) and the time spent listening to the station (Time Spent Listening or Average Time Exposed)
A station rating (whether "rating" as a percent of the universe, "share" as a percent of only those listening to radio at the time, or average persons that share and rating represent) is a product of cume and time spent hearing a station.
There use to be cume and TSL or time spent listening.
There still are. In fact, that is all that either a diary or a meter measure.
Cume is how many bodies you can gather in any one period and time spent listening is how long they listen.
That's correct... except that the PPM does a better job on two accounts: measuring stations that the person did not themselves pick and stations that are not a person's favorites but which they used regularly.
The diary, unfortunately, measured a person's memory as well as TSL and Cume. If a station was not top of mind, it did not get written in. And if a person listened from 9:13 to 9:42, they wrote in "9 to 10 AM" when, in the PPM they would get only two quarter hour credits, not four.
The CHR's and the other big cumers of the world tried to get as many with a heartbeat to listen knowing that they would have something else to do shortly. So a lot of bodies with a short listening span.
CHR has always been big cume, short intervals. PPM better shows that this kind of station is among the regularly used stations of a much larger group of listeners.
Smooth jazz worked just the other way around. We had a smaller number of bodies but they would stay with us for very large amounts of time.
The PPM showed that the exaggerated "loyalty" listening of the diary was not real for a variety of formats, including many niche or specialized formats... not just smooth jazz.
PPM now says that how long you listen is no longer important.
Listening time is vitally important. But we have realized that people interrupt their listening a lot... coffee break, bathroom break, take-the-kids-to-the-schoolbus-stop break, take out the trash break, go to the warehouse break, lunch break, phone call break... and so long listening is actually a batch of incidents with breaks interspersed.
The diary, inaccurately, tends not to capture interruptions. So we got "10 AM to 4 PM" written in, not 12 incidents of around 10 minutes... which is the reality. Not 6 hours, but 2 hours.
The stations that already played that game were the least affected.
Stations that already reached lots of people were found to reach lots more. Even though the listening time measured by PPM was shorter, the increase in cume compensated.
Stations like country and urban that played in the middle where they drew large groups of bodies but they stayed around for sometime had to deal with losing that TSL and have had to adjust to the new mode of operation.
Due to the inaccuracy of the diary, all formats lost time listening /hearing. Niche formats grew less in cume, so they were shown to, in fact, have less average listening and not much more cume.
Stations like SJ just became unacceptable to ownership and how they make money no longer works in their business plan.
That's not just a PPM issue. Smooth jazz stations were losing the under-55 audience, and without under-55, a large market station just can't find revenue enough to survive.
It's truly a rabbit hole for terrestrial radio because they have homogized their products even more so and they are doing almost the same thing every hour and there are less choices in every market.
That is why radio is part of "mass media."
[/quote]A few years back, when the format became a hip beautiful muzak presentation, the end was in sight. It can't be as Bongwater said in another post "Snooze Jazz". All successful formats have to reinvent themselves and adapt to the future if they want to move forward and SJ never did.[/quote]
MOR did not reinvent itself, and neither did Beautiful Music.
Remember, "Smooth Jazz" has roots that are less than 25 years old... KTWV was where Cody and Leach et. al. developed "The Wave" which was more a new age format and presented as such. It was not until Chicago, where licensing issues made ownership sidestep the "Wave" name that "smooth jazz" was coined as an alternative name for the new age format.
Top 40 (named CHR by R&R just to be different) will be 60 in a month or two. You can't compare a format that has gotten 40 to 50 shares in some markets with one that got 4 or 5 shares at best in most places.
Terrestrial radio faces a new future with fewer listeners because the younger ones aren't there and the older ones are adapting faster than they think.
Younger listeners are there... but, like in all age groups, the listening time is lower because of the factors I have named... and because there are more entertainment options than were available 10, 20, 30 years ago. But as long as advertisers seek under-55 audiences, there is no place for formats that don't deliver that age range. PPM was just a better messenger.
