Audience

Boston’s Classical Shapeshifting – Updated

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Update 12/18: A new article in the Boston Globe here…

Before I talk about Boston, I want to thank those of you who made suggestions about better Xmas programming.  Even without actually hearing the music you suggested, I can hear it in my head and it makes me smile.  The wonderful trio from Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ — wow, gorgeous.  If you haven’t played it on your station yet this year, please do.  And so many other great suggestions.  Sounds like a lot of you are enriching your listeners.

Boston is going through growing pains with the new classical switchover from WCRB to WGBH.

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How many people are really listening?

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Hello, readers of my poor neglected blog. Apologies for not having posted for some time, but the usual deadlines have kept me away. Let’s jump right back in, though, with a look at a new way of measuring radio’s audience that is affecting all formats, including classical.

People outside the radio industry might not be aware of it, but a change is afoot in how radio stations gauge their listenership. Arbitron, the company that gathers ratings data for radio, is moving away from the paper diaries that listeners have long filled out by hand and embracing Portable People Meters — gadgets that can tune into and automatically register a radio station’s signal. This means PPMs should supposedly be more accurate, since they don’t rely on a listener’s possibly delayed or even incorrect recollection of what radio stations they listened to throughout a given day.

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You Are Old, Father William, the Walrus Said

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With apologies to Lewis Carroll for conflating his poems, and thanks to alert reader Dorron Katzin, I’d like to call your attention to a new study by Walrus Research, demonstrating that those of us who like classical music on the radio are aging.  In fact, those who don’t like classical music on the radio are aging, too.  It reminds me of the announcers who say, “it’s 10 am here on KING-FM.”

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Tech study sheds light on classical listeners’ habits

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A few weeks ago I paid a quick visit to the Public Radio Program Directors conference in Cleveland. I’m working on an article for Current about the application of midday classical music research, which was discussed on the conference, so I can’t get into that subject on this blog quite yet. But there’s one thing I can share: links to the second annual Public Radio Technology Study.

This extensive study by Jacobs Media surveyed more than 28,000 public radio listeners about their use of technology. Respondents were grouped according to their preferred radio formats, so there’s lots of information to digest about classical listeners in particular, and it’s interesting to compare their habits to those of other listeners.

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