Audience

On Monday I wrote about the midday music research conducted by the Public Radio Program Directors Association — a survey of hundreds of classical-music listeners that gauged their responses to dozens of snippets of music. The goal was to determine which sounds appealed to those listeners and which didn’t, thus helping programmers at classical public radio stations build audience by focusing on more user-friendly selections.

So how is this research being used? Following the release of the study’s results, 12 stations around the country began applying its lessons to their midday music mixes. I checked in with a few programmers to find out what changes they’re making.

“I’ve found that it’s taken me back to really trying to think and listen like my audience,” says Karen Walker, operations and music director at KBIA in Columbia, Mo. Walker has been combing through her station’s music library and classifying selections according to their appeal to the listeners surveyed in the study.

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A while back I wrote about the influential “core values” research conducted by the Public Radio Program Directors Association, which aimed to understand what listeners to classical music radio appreciate most about their stations of choice. Those studies were useful because they helped classical programmers put themselves in their listeners’ shoes and get a handle on why exactly people listen at all.

But the studies were limited in scope — they assessed the value of classical radio only in general terms and stopped short of gauging reactions to specific musical works. Last year, however, PRPD unveiled the results of the Midday Classical Music Testing Project, a study that aimed to do just that. The study asked groups of listeners to rate a wide range of musical snippets as appealing or unappealing, and programmers at classical stations are now revising their music mixes to line up with the findings in an effort to improve midday listening.

The 309 listeners in four cities who participated already listened to classical during middays on the stations in their markets. With handheld units, they registered their reactions to 150 30-second musical samples, noting positive or negative appeal.

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How should music directors and program directors at classical radio stations decide what to play? What do listeners most appreciate about their services?

These sound like pretty important questions, right? But put yourself in the place of one of these programmers (assuming you aren’t one) and think about how you’d answer those questions. You’d have piles of Arbitron ratings at your disposal, but those only show you when listeners tune in and out. Ratings don’t tell you why they listen or what makes your station valuable to them — at most, you can only infer answers to those questions from ratings.

But since 2002, a group of public radio programmers has been commissioning research to address these concerns. In a series of studies, the Public Radio Program Directors Association (PRPD) has surveyed listeners to various public radio formats, including classical, to deepen the field’s understanding of the value their services deliver. Their results have given programmers a new vocabulary to apply to their work and, in some cases, fed debates about the role of research in programming and public radio’s overall approach to classical music.

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