Programs/Content
Program directors point to multiple reasons for Triple A audience growth
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Listeners have been tuning in more frequently and listening longer. In some markets, they’re hearing new voices and more beats in the music mix.
Current (https://current.org/tag/audience/)
Listeners have been tuning in more frequently and listening longer. In some markets, they’re hearing new voices and more beats in the music mix.
Stop wringing your hands over how to attract Millennial and Gen Z audiences — focus on creating programs that give them more reasons to listen.
Stations outpaced their commercial competitors in audience share growth measured last month.
Whether news, music or multiformat, a station can zero in on underperforming programs.
The trend could affect revenue for NPR and its member stations.
Atlanta’s WCLK-FM, a jazz station licensed to Clark University, aims to double its audience share with a new approach to programming music that went into effect Aug. 26.
Of all the complex and potentially fateful decisions faced by public radio program directors as they navigate the emergence of multiplatform distribution, one of the most significant is the drive to “go local” and produce more local programs, especially news and information. This push signals a strategic shift for public radio, with potentially enormous consequences for growth or decline. Audience 2010, one of a series of landmark research reports on programming trends published in the previous decade, reported that much of the credit for the growth of public radio listenership could be traced to a shift “away from local production toward network production, away from music-based content toward news, information and entertainment.” That shift was extraordinarily successful, representing two decades of impressive audience expansion and financial growth at a time when other parts of the radio industry struggled. Now, it appears that program decision-makers are changing course. But why would dozens of stations move off the path that worked so well and choose another approach that, viewed through the lens of audience research, would seem to be both more costly and less powerful in attracting listenership?
Audiences for news and talk stations delivered more than half of public radio’s listening in 2012, according to Arbitron’s annual study on public radio audience trends. The average quarter-hour (AQH) share, an Arbitron term describing the percentage of public radio listeners who tune to a specific format, hit 51.7 percent for pubradio news and talk stations last year, an 2.7 percent increase from 2011 and a precedent for the growth of public radio’s most powerful format, according to Arbitron’s “Public Radio Today 2013.” The study, which looked at audience trends across all stations and formats in 2012, found that public radio’s total audience remained at 32 million, or 12 percent, of all radio listeners. The number of weekly listeners grew by 7.5 percent, or 1.2 million, to a total of 18 million. Triple-A stations contributed to the gains by boosting the format’s weekly cume to 3.4 million listeners, an increase of 8.7 percent.
The landscape of the audience-ratings business began shifting with this morning’s announcement that Nielsen Holdings plans to buy Arbitron Inc. in a $1.62 billion all-cash deal. New York-based Nielsen will pay $48 per share under the sales agreement, a 26 percent premium from Maryland-based Arbitron’s closing price on Monday. The deal, announced Tuesday, is supported by the boards of both companies. Bloomberg News reports that the agreement will have to meet antitrust standards of the Federal Trade Commission before the sale can close. “I would expect to see some push back from local customers like local radio and TV operating groups,” Rich Tullo, an analyst at Albert Fried & Co.