New ratings system for radio gives guilty pleasures a boost

American men have a naughty little secret. Sometimes, they like to relax with a little Céline Dion. Professed classical music fans have one, too: As it turns out, they don’t tune into classical radio nearly as much as they claim.

These are two of many findings shaking up the radio industry as it converts from measuring ratings through surveys to monitoring listeners electronically using Portable People Meters.

As radio executives are discovering, what people say they do and what they actually do is different — especially where “My Heart Will Go On” is concerned.

That more men are mellowing out to Air Supply than are willing to admit it is a curious discovery, but the new system has serious repercussions, especially for classical radio. When 12 major areas, including New York and Los Angeles, switched to the system last year, classical radio’s market share fell 10.7 percent in those areas, a significant drop, according to a study by Research Director, a ratings consultancy.

The numbers are part of what an industry consultant, Marc Hand, calls “a smorgasbord of issues” facing commercial classical music stations. In the last year, major commercial stations including WCRB in Boston and WQXR in New York were both sold to public radio operators, while KFUO in St. Louis was sold to a Christian broadcaster. (WQXR was owned by the New York Times Co.) There are now only about 20 commercial classical stations in the country, said Hand, managing director of Public Radio Capital, which advises nonprofit stations on acquisitions.

The decline has concerned classical fans, who see radio as an important civilizing force.

“It’s education but also expanding horizons, understanding the existence of a whole host of art forms that are extremely related and important to our cultural history,” said Joseph Polisi, president of the Juilliard School.

Talk radio turns out to have fewer fans than previously thought. The market share of talk radio declined 2.6 percent in the study of cities where the meters were used. Michael Harrison, publisher of the trade magazine Talkers, cautioned that Arbitron’s sample size in markets using the meters was relatively small.

The new ratings have contributed to other shifts. Mainstream formats like oldies, news and country have fared better.

Meanwhile, smooth jazz has hit a low note. Clear Channel jettisoned such programming from eight of its stations after dismal ratings. Some Spanish-language stations’ ratings declined sharply — at Univision’s KLVE in Los Angeles, for example, ratings fell 54 percent in the first quarter of 2009 from the same period the year before, leading it and other broadcasters to testify before Congress on Dec. 2 that the new system is discriminatory.

The television industry had switched from diary entries to metered ratings in 1987 and had seen similarly surprising changes — young men, for instance, watched cartoons much more heavily than they had reported doing, said Gary Holmes, a spokesman for Nielsen. But it took the radio industry almost two decades to catch up.

Since the 1960s, Arbitron, the main radio ratings company, has relied on paper diaries. It currently asks about 800,000 people annually to log a week of listening habits. Problems have been numerous: People’s recollections were imperfect, if they listened to a station briefly they could forget it, and they might overstate listening to stations that they felt reflected better taste.

“People tended to look at it almost like an election — they would vote for the things they liked,” said Jaye Albright, an industry consultant with Albright & O’Malley, a radio consultancy.

« Money

Share