Arbitron study looks at classical formats

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Arbitron has released its Public Radio Today 2009 study, which looks at recent listening trends in all of public radio’s formats. The report is brimming with all sorts of facts and statistics that will interest anyone working at an all-classical or dual-format public radio station.

Here are some highlights I gleaned:

  • Full-time classical was the only format to increase its audience from fall 2006 to fall 2008 (by a percentage point, to 14 percent). All of that growth came in the Pacific and South Atlantic regions.
  • It was the also the only format to grow audience share during middays.
  • All-classical is public radio’s third–most-popular format, with 100 stations carrying it in fall 2008.
  • It attracts a larger share of female listeners than any other format.
  • “Nearly all Classical listeners (99%) have at least completed high school—a remarkable statistic no other format, public or commercial, can match.”

And some facts about the dual or “News-Classical” format (defined by Arbitron as a format with at least 30 percent of programming devoted to news and at least the same share to classical on weekdays, 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.).

  • News-Classical has the highest average Time Spent Listening than any other format, with 6 hours and 30 minutes a week.
  • Overall News-Classical ratings dropped, but in the East North Central region it grew more share than any other format.
  • It is public radio’s most popular format, with 20.2 percent of all listening.

You can read the whole study here (PDF). Thanks to the blog at Current for the heads-up.

About Mike Janssen

Mike Janssen Served as Scanning The Dial's original co-authors from Mar, 2008 to Jan, 2010 and is a freelance writer, editor and media educator based in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He has written extensively about radio, mostly for Current, the trade newspaper about public broadcasting, where his articles have appeared since 1999. He has also worked in public radio as a reporter at WFDD-FM in Winston-Salem, N.C., where he began his career in journalism and filed pieces for NPR. Mike's work in radio expanded to include outreach and advocacy in 2007, when he worked with the Future of Music Coalition to recruit applicants for noncommercial radio stations. He has since embarked on writing a series of articles about radio hopefuls for FMC's blog.

Mike also writes regularly for Retail Traffic magazine and teaches workshops about writing, podcasting and radio journalism. In his spare time he enjoys vegetarian food, the outdoors, reading, movies and traveling. You can learn more about Mike and find links to more of his writing and reporting at mikejanssen.net.

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2 thoughts on “Arbitron study looks at classical formats”

  1. This report is actually less confusing than I expected all this audience research information to be:)

    The second part of this report contains lots of interesting data that I’m sharing with our underwriting folks — high percentages of public radio listeners attending concerts, plays, and other events, as well as the stuff about buying organic food, etc.

    I am confused about the criteria for being news/classical and news/music. News/classical spends “at least 30% of their Monday-Friday 6AM-7PM airtime playing classical music,” while news/music spends “at least 30% of their airtime with a mix of music formats” with no time window specified. Is it possible to fit both of these definitions? Then which format are you considered?

    -Mona

    Reply

  2. NPR also gathers a LOT of that kind of information about public radio listeners, in an obscene and amusing level of detail — I think they call them their “Profile” reports. Not sure how stations can go about getting it, but I think it’s pretty freely available — maybe through the nprstations.org website, or whatever incarnation that’s in these days?

    I guess conceivably a station could devote both 30 percent of its schedule to classical music and another 30 percent to other formats. But are there any stations that do that? I’m guessing that any station playing that much classical music will be considered as first and foremost a classical station, no matter what other formats it dabbles in. News/music probably includes Triple A.

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