For the first time, public radio's audience declined for two years in a row, according to the spring Arbitron Nationwide report covering the full week, 6 a.m. to midnight, ages 12 and older. The numbers are estimates of individuals listening during an average quarter-hour. (Source: Arbitron data released by Radio Research Consortium.)
Public radio’s accustomed audience growth has leveled off, falling slightly in the spring Arbitron ratings for a second straight year, according to recently released data.
The spring survey of nationwide listening to public radio showed public radio’s Average Quarter Hour audience fell 2.3 percent from the year before—a small decline but the largest in 25 years.
Coming on the heels of a 0.9 percent drop from 2003 to 2004, it was also the first time the rating fell for two successive years. Cume audience fell 1.5 percent, setting another record. The only other year public radio stations ever lost cume was in 2000.
For many years, public radio’s AQH audience has bucked the downward trend afflicting radio in general since the early ’80s. This year, for the first time, the decline in listening to public radio exceeded the decline in radio listening overall.
“It’s the first time we’re not growing,” says Carl Nelson, manager of client services for the Radio Research Consortium, which buys and processes Arbitron ratings for the public radio system.
The glum news echoes similarly lackluster performance in fundraising. Most of the 51 stations surveyed by Target Analysis Group lost members for the first time in a decade from fiscal year 2003 to fiscal year 2004, and their member and revenue growth tapered off for the second straight year.
In addition, a CPB-commissioned study found last year that more than half of public radio’s licensees failed to earn net revenue equal to 2 percent of their operating revenue—a measure that CPB deemed proof of financial health.
The trends in audience, fundraising and revenue “should be a wake-up call to stations,” says Greg Schnirring, newly promoted to v.p. of radio at CPB.
New technologies such as podcasting and digital radio may be distracting managers and programmers from their core broadcast services, Schnirring speculates. He suggests a systemwide summit to address the slippages.
News fatigue, commercial inroads
Researchers are unable to explain what causes the audience declines, but they hope further analysis in coming weeks will clarify the picture. They stress that the small drops should be viewed in the context of public radio’s remarkable growth over recent decades. Its cume audience has more than quintupled since 1980 and grew by 22 percent from 2000 to 2004.
“We’ve had just tremendous growth in the past five years,” says Jackie Nixon, NPR’s director of audience and corporate research. “We expected to see some sort of leveling off in the audience.”
Several times since 1980, rapid listening growth has leveled off for a year (see chart above). But this time the stagnation extended into a second year.
Looking only at top-line Arbitron numbers can’t explain the trend, and there are no reliable measurements of the listenership of potential competitors such as podcasts and satellite radio. But observers suggest several possibilities.
One is that public radio listeners could be suffering from “news fatigue,” says Nixon. Among public radio stations, those with all-news formats have enjoyed some of the largest audience gains since 2000. That could suggest that the heavy news cycle running from the 2000 presidential election and 9/11 to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq helped draw more listeners to public radio than ever before.
Post-Iraq, however, world events have failed to command as much attention, and “people are kind of tuning things out,” Nixon says. The spring 2005 survey occurred before Arbitron would have seen any gains from radio coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
Recent changes at commercial radio stations might also be luring public radio listeners, suggests Tom Thomas, co-c.e.o. of pubradio’s Station Resource Group. Some commercial stations have reduced the number of commercials they air in response to flak from listeners and other media.
Commercial stations are also experimenting with new formats, such as Jack, which aims to mimic an iPod on shuffle mode, playing a more eclectic mix of music. Stations with formats such as Neo-Radio and liberal talk radio, though less common, have made direct appeals to pubradio listeners.
“It’s important to remember that, while we think of public radio’s audience as our audience, in fact the majority spends as much or more time listening to commercial radio,” Thomas says. “We’re competing with a lot of other choices on the radio dial.”
Which numbers really matter?
Analysts will soon begin parsing data by format and demographics to answer questions about the trends. For instance, which stations and formats in particular have lost audience? If news stations are suffering, that could support the news fatigue theory, for example.
Many in public radio have argued that local programming will help public radio resist competition from satellite and Internet radio. But data show that the much-touted local programming helps little.
Classical and jazz are public radio’s most popular formats, but their share of all listening to public radio has fallen steadily since spring 2001, according to Leslie Peters, v.p. of knowledge management for Audience Research Analysis. Triple A and eclectic music formats have stayed flat, as have local news and information.
Meanwhile, national programming has drawn a larger percentage of public radio listening since ARA’s Audience 98 study. It now accounts for 62 percent of listening, up from 49 percent.
Further number-crunching may determine that the spring 2005 numbers are less worrisome than they appear. The early findings fail to measure loyalty, for example, which relates closely to listener donations.
Average loyalty to public radio was rising before spring 2003, as was core audience, Peters says. (Loyalty is a station’s share of its own listeners’ total radio use.) ARA will research whether it has risen since. If so, the small drops in cume and AQH could look less foreboding.
“Sheer size is not the most important number,” Peters says. “We have never been about sheer numbers—there’s no reason for us to start being about sheer numbers now.”
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posted Nov. 4, 2005, revised May 8, 2006
Copyright 2005 by Current Publishing Committee