The messy suicide of commercial radio series; (part 15) Arbitron Rated #1 in symphonic-punk-country-disco (Fragging the format)

It bears repeating: in commercial radio the format is flypaper, and all of us are the flies. To extend the metaphor a bit, the format is specialised flypaper, and it targets specific flies. The stations you listen to know (generally) who you are and are set up to keep you listening and sell you their advertisers’ products.

Where television has Nielsen tracking viewers, radio has Arbitron tracking its listeners. Up until very recently (and still in some markets), both Nielsen and Arbitron accomplished this feat through fairly similar means. Both solicited people randomly and asked if, for a small stipend, they would be willing to have their viewing or listening habits tracked.

“When you agree to keep a diary, you pretty much open your life to Arbitron,” said radio and television columnist Larry Bonko.

There is a page of “quick questions” to answer: What is your age? Where do you live? Thinking back six months, what radio station did you listen to most of the time? Arbitron asks about your income, the amount of schooling you’ve had and the zip codes of the places where you live and work… . Upon being selected, you are promised by Arbitron that the survey is easy and fun. Easy? Yep. Fun? That’s a stretch. It’s work. Arbitron paid me $5 to listen to the radio, fill in the diaries with the bright blue covers and mail them back in a postage-paid envelope.

Arbitron then collects this information and creates an elaborate demographic breakdown of who listens to what when and where. However, in other markets, Arbitron has started to use “people meters.” These devices are worn by the consumer and register inaudible signals broadcast as part of the radio station signals. When the devices are turned in, the data in them is put into a computer.

The consumers still have to fill in the demographic information, but the meters make the listeners’ diary entries for them. While it makes general information available to the public, like the overall radio station ratings – what the company calls “topline” ratings – the big news gets collected in what radio and advertisers refer to as “the book.” The book not only shows how one station compares to another overall, but also breaks it down by the part of day and the listener’s age, income, sex, and race. So a station might be rated #6 overall and have a full point and a half fewer ratings than the #1 station in the market, but still demand more per minute in advertising because that #6 station’s minute reaches a much more affluent listener than the #1 station’s minute.

How detailed does Arbitron research get? A recent report revealed such fascinating nuggets as:

• 82.5 percent of Chinese-speaking Asian Americans in New York and Los Angeles aged 12 and over listen to the radio for an average of 16 hours a week.

• 56.2 percent of that listening was done to the Chinese-language stations. The English-language formats Chinese-speaking Americans listened were:

• Adult contemporary (6.4 percent)

• News (6.2 percent)

• Pop CHR [contemporary hit radio] (5.2 percent)

• 53.6 percent of them attended some college

• 23.1 percent live in households with income greater than $75 000.

There was much more, but you get the general drift: Arbitron knows a lot about the people who take its surveys.

One of the things this report points out is that different formats reach different people. For example, in New York City, as of this writing, Clear Channel Entertainment owns adult contemporary station WLTW, urban station WWPR, CHR station WHTZ, classic rock station WQCD, rhythmic CHR station WKTU, and adult contemporary station WALK (actually a suburban station, but tracked with the NYC stations). These formats are designed, via their Selector databases, to reach different listeners.

Joe Smith noted

What has happened is that radio has fragmented so much, to deal with special audiences, girls 15 – 19 who are left-handed. I could, on the radio [in the 1950s] – as could any disc jockey in the country – play a range of Bo Diddley to Doris Day, without ever considering that you were crossing unknown lines. You were programming hit records, and hit records seemed to have a commonality of interest. I was not looking to a black audience or a girls’ audience or an older audience.

Consider that the fast-dimishing oldies formats are the only stations that would dare segue from James Brown to Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Ronettes with no one thinking twice about it, because radio during the era they try to recapture sounded like that. Today, when formats tend to run all R&B or all contemporary hits, that sounds astonishingly egalitarian – and try finding a non-oldies station that plays the Ronettes or James Brown at all. Programmers would have you believe that older hits have neither relevance nor resonance outside of specific formats geared toward older music.

Beyond that, if a station’s Arbitron ratings fall below a certain area, or it doesn’t seem to reach the demographic it craves, it will flip formats. Often this causes such an outcry from fans of the “failed” format that they write to the FCC for relief. However, the FCC’s stand on the issue is as follows:

The Commission is authorised by law – the Communications Act of 1934, as amended – to license broadcast stations and to regulate their operations in some respects, but the act prohibits the Commission from censoring broadcast matter and from taking any action that would interfere with free speech in broadcasting, a freedom also guaranteed in our Constitution’s First Amendment. [I wonder what pre-Sirius Howard Stern and CBS would say about that.] Therefore, although there are limited statutory exceptions, in general neither the FCC nor any other governmental agency has the authority to direct broadcasters in the selection and presentation of programming… . No federal law or regulation requires that the Commission’s permission be obtained for a change in a radio station’s entertainment format.

A 2000 report found that there are about 10 000 commercial radio stations in the U.S. Although, as just noted, formats can change at the drop of an Arbitron point, at the time the popular music formats on radio (excluding news, talk, classical, and sports radio) broke down like this:

Format	# of Stations
Rock and modern rock (formerly known as album-oriented rock)	1 990
Adult contemporary (contemporary without hard rock or hip-hop)	692
Rhythmic Top 40 (pop, R&B, and hip-hop)	495
Contemporary hit radio [CHR] (Top 40 with a 20-song playlist; all [the same] hits, all the time)	306
Adult album alternative (music for former album-rock fans who still wanna rawk; modern rock without the synthesizers)	176
Urban (modern R&B and hip-hop)	103
Spanish (actually a bunch of different genres, from tropical to Tejano, but the survey didn’t subdivide)	103
Alternative (the breeding ground for rock and [especially] modern rock, but edgier, with fewer synthesizers)	85
Country (another variegated species of radio that didn’t get subdivided)	80
Soft adult contemporary (all-new-so-soft-it’s-squishy music)	75
Urban adult (modern R&B without hip-hop)	61
Modern adult (“soft rock without the oldies”)	59
Smooth jazz (aka instrumental pop)	36
Jazz	32

Smith lamented this new fragmentation:

Now there are people who do a lot of research, phone-outs, phone-ins, and again, narrow banding in terms of their outreach to what they play. It’s ludicrous to me that a record doesn’t make it into the AOR [album-oriented rock, what is now called modern rock] world. What is the AOR world? Have we invented a group of people who won’t listen to this hit record by Kenny Rogers? That’s awful. Kenny Rogers makes some wonderful records that last a long time; people dance to them and hear them. If the guy’s got a #1 record of “Lady,” why couldn’t that be played on a radio station? But the narrowcasting, and the perceptions that programmers have of putting people in bags, is what’s different from where it was back in the radio of the ‘50s.

Of course, this is all powered by advertising. If a format like adult contemporary appeals predominantly to women – and Arbitron consistently reports that it does – where do you want to advertise tampons? If a format consistently appeals to men 25 – 54, where do you want to advertise beer? If your medium is radio, Arbitron tells you which flypaper attracts which flies, how many of them, and how often.

“It’s a tool,” said one station owner, “that we use in our business every day.”