Huh? What are you talking about? The talent pool isn't aging. The audience for oldies is. Stay on topic.
"Need people" for what? The only people they need are salespeople. More commercials. No DJs at Pandora or Spotify.
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Radio - dead and loving it (sorry Mel Brooks)
- Thread starter howdareu
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Huh? What are you talking about? The talent pool isn't aging. The audience for oldies is. Stay on topic.
"Need people" for what? The only people they need are salespeople. More commercials. No DJs at Pandora or Spotify.
Yet in the Seattle market 15% of the listening is to AM. Considering how few AMs actually cover a significant portion of the market, that is not something "no one wants".
But there are quite a few variations of AC, and ones on one extreme may not play any of the songs the ones on the other extreme play.
To give you perspective, I often hear "why does LA have so many Spanish stations?. This is often accompanied by a statement that they all sound the same.
There are 15 LA FM signals in Spanish, and about 6 on AM. There are 7 or 8 different real formats such as the equivalents of classic hits, AC, CHR, country, classic country, talk, sports, religion, rhythmic and such. There are over 5 million Hispanics in LA, and 75% of them use Spanish radio. So isn't it fair that there be quite a few stations for all those different people?
If there are 9 AC stations, it means that most are doing well which means that there is demand. If there is no Smooth Jazz station or no AAA station, it means that there is either no listener interest or no advertiser interest in the potential listeners of such a format.
I never heard that any on-air talent thought about suing Arbitron. There were plenty of dissatisfied stations when the PPM came out, but the roll-out began 8 years ago. One company I know well refused to encode until the issues were resolved... and that company had stations in 6 of the top 10 markets. Yet today, that company is subscribed and uses the PPM results (and watches the sample and procedures very closely).
There has always been a policy that if there is an error or problem with a book, and fixing the problem causes any station to change rank, the book will be reissued. I've personally had 4 or 5 books reissued over the years so I am familiar with the procedures. However, the changes are relatively minor in the big picture.
The good thing is that Nielsen works with stations to remedy any issues and they respond favorably to requests for clarifications or investigations. Also keep in mind that the PPM requires total household participation, so "two households" could mean 12 to 15 people.
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If you believe the convoluted conversion from "concurrent sessions" and "session starts" to cume and AQH that Pandora makes, then we see that Pandora would have somewhere around a 5 or 6 share of "radio listening" across the US.
Spotify, which is more of a "music rental" system than a "radio station" is generally not compared in these rankings.
6% is not "greater" in any way than terrestrial radio listening.
Who said you did? I asked where are the DJs at Pandora and Spotify. You changed the subject. Please try to stay on topic.
Actually, I was the one who posted to question the idea that air personalities would actually sue Arbitron.
I'm sure that some of the personalities who were revealed to have "big names and much less real listening" by the PPM considered lashing out. But that would have been for the optics and not reality. The cost of suing would have been beyond almost anyone currently on terrestrial radio, and would have required paying hundreds of thousands for expert analysis and even more for expert witnesses as well as astronomical legal fees.
On thing is to say, "I'm gonna' sue the bas..." and another thing is to find a lawyer that would even take the case.
Even the broadcasters who felt the system was not ready for "currency" status did not sue.
Arbitron (now Nielsen) is it's own master and deals with no significant competition, like the lawyers and the BAR they rule themselves like any corrupt kingdom.
The reason the PPM was so offensive is because the ratings changed RADICALLY OVERNIGHT when PPM went into effect, thus looking more like witchcraft than science. But that is something today's marijuana heavy college types can appreciate without contradiction.
Clearly the spin will continue to rule radio as the curtain comes down, I imagine more desperate articles every day on inside radio about how many listeners still tolerate radio. Strangely apple doesn't seem to have the same paranoia about the iPhone which proves popularity without excuses or voodoo ratings based on some freak wearing a box for ratings, walking through a mall and picking up any receiver nearby to calculate as a "listener" broad sample or whatever it is this week.
The reason the PPM was so offensive is because the ratings changed RADICALLY OVERNIGHT when PPM went into effect, thus looking more like witchcraft than science. But that is something today's marijuana heavy college types can appreciate without contradiction.
Clearly the spin will continue to rule radio as the curtain comes down, I imagine more desperate articles every day on inside radio about how many listeners still tolerate radio. Strangely apple doesn't seem to have the same paranoia about the iPhone which proves popularity without excuses or voodoo ratings based on some freak wearing a box for ratings, walking through a mall and picking up any receiver nearby to calculate as a "listener" broad sample or whatever it is this week.
OK, we admit it. The reason 91.4% still listen to radio is the subliminal messages we send out. There are a few out there that have had hearing loss that means they can't hear these messages which creates the negative reaction to radio in general. Now you know. Don't tell the streamers or XM/Sirius, okay?
And do you know why they have survived and prospered when others have not?
It is because the ad agencies and major advertisers trust the data to make billions of dollars in ad buys. The agencies and advertisers have the MRC audits and reviews of methodology to verify the accuracy of the data.
Pulse, Hooper, Mediastat, Mediatrend, Birch, SRC, Strategy Research, Burke, Mobiltrack, Audits and Surveys, Nielsen (before it bought Arbitron) and several others have tried to compete, and have not done the job that Arbitron did in providing the product that advertisers wanted.
As someone who was part of the original Philadelphia PPM tests in 2002 and in Houston in 2004, I can say that we knew what was coming and it was a more accurate representation of listening than the diary. That's because the diary measured cume, TSL and memory, while the PPM only measured cume and TSL. So stations that were less "top of mind" but that got lots of listening did better, and ones that were top of mind but not really listened to as much did worse.
Radio had speculated for decades about "phantom cume" and the PPM dimensioned the audience better than the memory-based diary.
Accidental listening has nearly no discernable effect on ratings. While having your PPM detect a station you did not choose for one quarter hour in a particular week, that only increases the cume. Ad buys are AQH driven (share, rating, AQH persons are the same thing) and not cume driven. About 50% of a station's cumers give somewhere around 92% of the AQH listening. The others are light occasional listening incidents or accidental listening or listening to someone else's choice of stations while in their work area, store or whatever.
Rentrak is starting to get some real interest from agencies due to their ability to measure both on line and off line viewing. It's only TV/video right now but that's right in Nielsen's wheelhouse.
As an advertiser I am at least somewhat suspicious of Pandora's numbers. I have the luxury of working with local advertisers and at the end of the day I invest their hard earned and very much appreciated advertising budgets and get to see what drives people thru the door and try different media and approaches. Everything has it's place but I am far from abandoning local radio- in fact I predicted last year in a post on this very board that radio would - at least locally here in PNW- have an 'up' year due to a variety of factors. Time will tell if I am correct.
As an advertiser I am at least somewhat suspicious of Pandora's numbers. I have the luxury of working with local advertisers and at the end of the day I invest their hard earned and very much appreciated advertising budgets and get to see what drives people thru the door and try different media and approaches. Everything has it's place but I am far from abandoning local radio- in fact I predicted last year in a post on this very board that radio would - at least locally here in PNW- have an 'up' year due to a variety of factors. Time will tell if I am correct.
I notice it is NOT disputed that the ratings changed overnight - electronic monitoring may be more modern but the effect was still problematic, the data changed OVERNIGHT. So if your teenager runs off and gets married OVERNIGHT to the guy she just met on the web the day before, you would find equally logical balance to that situation as well no doubt.
I'm not the one who wanted to do a lawsuit by the way, just the messenger. But apparently they just didn't understand that sudden shifts in data are not a problem.
I'm not the one who wanted to do a lawsuit by the way, just the messenger. But apparently they just didn't understand that sudden shifts in data are not a problem.
While present day 20 somethings may still be choosing radio over streaming -- as you say -- it remains to be seen whether the current crop of teens will switch to OTA just because they graduate from college.
As for the possibility of choosing to pay for streaming services, those young people are now already paying for their expensive devices and datastreams right now -- if a young person can afford a $150 phone bill, they can probably afford an extra 5 bucks to pay for a streaming service.
In your view, that calls into question the PPM methodology. But the other way of looking at it is it calls into question the diary methodology that produced the previous numbers.
There was a time when record sales were not based on bar codes. Instead they were based on orders placed by retailers. But about 25 years ago, the recording industry changed their methodology, and the numbers changed overnight. For the first time, we had ACTUAL sales numbers, rather than numbers based on a human retail manager. One of the first beneficiaries was a country singer named Garth Brooks. At the time, Garth was asked about his success, and he credited the change in methodology. As a result of this change in methodology, we got to see ACTUAL sales figures, and they were very different from what we'd seen before. When changes occur, there are winners and losers. Those who built their career on the previous methodology have to adapt to the new methodology. That's what happened in record sales, and that's what has happened in PPM. It's like making a rule change in sports. Adding the 3 point shot radically changed the game of basketball overnight. Having a playoff for the national championship changed NCAA football overnight. That's life. Something big happens, and the game is changed overnight. You learn, you adapt, and you change with it.
The other part of this that you ignore is that, yes, the numbers changed radically overnight. So did the COST of getting those numbers. IIRC, it costs TEN TIMES as much to get PPM as diary. If you really want to piss off a station owner, tell him he his subscription price for Arbitron will be radically more than what he's budgeted, he has no recourse, AND the new numbers will probably be lower than what he had before. Forget about how this affected air talent. This change was traumatic for radio owners, and they screamed and shouted for a very long time. So sure, go ahead and sue. Make my day. Let me know how it works out for you.
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Once again, it remains to be seen if Pandora and Spotify will survive. Neither company is making money, regardless of the number of users. The music industry has stacked the game against companies who make money using music. And based on my dealings with the music industry, as well as the recent announcement from the copyright office, it's clear that it will get MORE expensive to stream music. It's one thing to tack on a $5 a month streaming charge, with all of that money going to copyright holders. But Pandora is paying more than half of its revenues (not profits, because they have none) in music royalties. Imagine having a business with a line item cost that eats up over half of your revenue, before rent, employees, insurance, utilities, etc. It's a terrible business model. We already saw what the music industry did to Napster. They're doing the same thing now to Pandora and Spotify. Artists are removing their music from Spotify because they feel they're not making enough money. Same with YouTube. The law allows them to do that. Not with OTA radio. So the playing field will change with regards to streaming radio, REGARDLESS of what the current crop of teens do. At the same time, there is a movement to activate the FM chip in cell phones, something that's available in many other countries. Imagine having radio service on your phone that doesn't cost anything. Imagine how successful that would be.
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Why does the law not allow artists to remove music from OTA radio? I wasn't aware that they were disallowed that.
I remember hearing on the news about Taylor Swift removing her album from Spotify because she believed it was cutting into sales, as you said.
FM chip activation in smart phones could lengthen the life of OTA radio, that's for sure.
I don't know that they're "disallowed." It's more like the digital laws gave artists more rights with their music than they had before.
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I don't really understand this whole thing. Why did they decide that performers suddenly have the right to additional compensation and who gave them the right to decide? You would think that online services would just have to pay a blanket fee to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, just like the broadcasters and that would be the end of it.
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Because the music industry isn't that smart. Rather than see the value in things, they're still trying to make up for their lack of a digital strategy when Napster came along. They have their tail between their legs and don't have a vision for the future other than trying to screw outlets that would help them.
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Another thing to consider is the whole net neutrality issue. Traditional cable TV is beginning to erode and people opting for the Netflix, Hulu, Roku, Apple TV and people just not seeing the value in it anymore. ISPs are turning to the Internet as their main source of revenue (just wait until Sling TV goes live later this year, then there will be some serious hurt in cable subscriptions). Those data caps will become even more stringent, resulting in merging or shutdowns of music streaming services.
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