The RBR pieced linked in the opening post on this thread lists the platforms on which RD is available: RadioDisney.com, Sirius and XM satellite radio, I-Tunes Radio Tuner, XM/DIRECTV, mobile phones and on its all new Radio Disney I-Phone App – as well as on 49 terrestrial stations (down from 52 a few months ago), all but three of them AM’s.
It gives some daypart and demographic breakouts from Disney’s customized national Arbitron study, but it says nothing about the proportion of listening on line. And they wouldn’t dare, because the few agency-produced national and regional spots they’re able to sell either nationally or locally (I’ve heard a lot of WalMart and Home Depot, among others) don’t run on the web stream, thanks to AFTRA rules. RD scarcely shows up in the standard Arbitron books anywhere, and showing how much of their audience is listening online might make their inventory virtually unsellable.
Another thing you may have missed: RD’s Monday-Sunday 6am-12M ratings, which are given at the end of the piece for all the groups mentioned earlier, are roughly half the weekday morning and afternoon drive figures. This is a big difference, and that lends itself to an interesting interpretation.
First, most kids are in school during the day, so we know there isn’t much midday listening in the target 8-13 demo-, and the older ones usually have homework during evening hours, except in summer. So the daypart breakouts aren’t surprising. But considering that kids that age are most likely to use a computer for recreational purposes during afternoon drive (“after school time” to them), it seems likely that a very high proportion of listening in that peak period is online.
And second, forget about evening listening, when most RD AM’s operate with drastically reduced power (it’s a 17-dB reduction, from 50kw to 950 watts, for WWJZ). What about the effect of critical hours, which cover much of morning and afternoon drive in mid-winter?
Even the daytime coverage isn’t great. I can get it at home, but I can’t get usuable reception in my car except on limited-access highways and back country roads, where there are no utility poles, industrial buildings or LED traffic lights!
But fifth-rate (and worse) frequency assignments and power levels in most markets aren’t RD’s only problem. They’re making things much worse for themselves by further compromising their already inadequate signals with the Hiss-O-Matic system, better known as “HD” AM. And it’s not only their own “HD” that’s hurting them. Second-adjacent WFAN”s unmodulated 660-kHz carrier covers WWJZ’s transmitter site with a 60 dBu groundwave, so its lower “HD” is only 15 dB below that!
Of course, hiss isn’t the worst thing about the system. The dull, muffled analog audio is. It’s been described as sounding like a pair of tin cans connected by a string, but tin cans actually offer slightly better articulation. To me, it sounds more like what you’d hear if someone was talking through the empty cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper, with a handkerchief over the end of the tube to further muffle whatever consonant sounds survived the journey! It’s no wonder that kind of sound is driving whatever audience RD has to other platforms, especially the internet.
