Charlie Cook On Air: Country Radio's Competing Formats
If you work in the radio business, Arbitron is your greatest fear or your best friend. To be fair, Arbitron has nothing to do with whether you are successful or not. That falls on you; however, Arbitron does tell everyone. They are a great resource. If you use the research they gather beyond the audience rank, you can begin to build a story for your station against other media and making sure you’re on target. New information from Arbitron was released recently and continues to provide good news for radio in general and Country radio in particular. The Country radio station audience continued to grow and remained the most listened to format. The growth came from listeners aged 18-24 and Country is ranked the number two most listened to format with teens nationally.
I am theorizing that this comes from performers like Hunter Hayes, Brantley Gilbert, Luke Bryan and of course Taylor Swift. Add the success of The Voice with young people and the audience Blake Shelton brings to the radio. I know I am leaving out a half dozen more acts that appeal to the 12-24 year olds to benefit Country radio, but you get the point. Top 40 is actually the fastest growing music format on the radio and because the time spent with Top 40 stations is less than a format like Country, the actual number of weekly listeners in number one. While Country radio has spurted with teens recently, 30 percent of all female teens listen to Top 40 radio nationally. Because Country radio gets 50 percent of its audience from females, the other format Country stations need to be aware of is Contemporary Christian music. It has the highest proportion of female listeners in the Arbitron study. You read that right. The industry believes the format is female leaning in appeal but the truth is the gender split is close to 50/50. A year ago, the format saw the largest share of males in the last six years.
While the share of younger listeners is growing on Country radio, the sweet spot is showing some erosion. The 35-54 share of the audience is off with the 35-44 portion down more than what would be comfortable. Is that attributable to the rise in Contemporary Christian? Or is that where Country is strong versus other markets? We like to think Country is strong just in the South and Southwest but market size is the real determiner. Overall, the format has a 14.2 share, all in. In the PPM markets the share is half that at 7.8. In some markets the share doubles to 15.6 on average and zooms to over a quarter of the audience (25.2) in non-Metro markets.
That said, there is a definite delineation of success of the format. A swatch from Idaho to West Virginia, in some areas three states deep, the format performs substantially above average. Only in California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Rhode Island does the format perform substantially below average. Country radio performs way above index from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. with radio listeners with middays scoring the highest against average. Weekends continue to be a challenge. I wonder if all of the remote Country stations do Saturdays to help the bottom line at the expense of audience tune-ins. The format scores an 80 on the index scale. Yikes! Remotes are NOT going away so stations should step up and make them less a chore and more a fun experience for listeners.
This information is valuable for programmers to understand the changing attitudes of their audience and for sales departments to know 92 percent of the American population is using radio each week. As listeners find other ways to use radio, we can track Country radio as the number one format for number of streaming stations at 60 percent of all FM stations streaming online and over a third of all AM country stations found online. HD radio is also becoming a player for country stations. A small number but already 10 percent of Country FMs are available in HD.
This is an exciting time for broadcast radio as owners and managers are providing the programming consumers want and new ways to use radio. Country should be proud to be leading the way.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MusicRow.)
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