In the markets it serves, Arbitron measures listening to all stations, regardless of whether they are clients of Arbitron (assuming they are encoding in PPM markets).
In contrast, Ando Media, the Arbitron of Internet radio, measures listenership only of its clients. This means that Ando’s ratings provide a foggy incomplete picture of what is happening with online radio.
The fog cleared a little this month when Ando released September ratings with Pandora included. Pandora is one of online radio’s superstars. New-media pundits have declared it’s ability to create unique playlists for each subscriber the future of radio.
We wonder whether Pandora is more about radio’s past.
Decades ago before research transformed radio, many Program Directors thought it was their job to educate listeners. Songs were chosen not because people liked them, but because people were supposed to like them.
Even after research started showing us that few listeners liked more than a couple hundred songs, “old school” PDs insisted on playing thousands of songs–for variety.
Gradually the overwhelming evidence started sinking in and radio evolved from playing what Program Directors liked to playing what listeners liked.
Pandora is a step backwards. But don’t take our word for it. Look at Pandora’s ratings.
The headlines have focused on Pandora’s top line number: 81,328,769. This is the number of times people (or more correctly IP addresses) tuned to Pandora in a week, what Ando calls Session Starts. It certainly is impressive, but given the buzz, it is understandable that people are checking it out.
More interesting is a metric that has gotten little attention, Average Time Spend Listening. In Ando’s terms, it is the average length of each session in hours. The accompanying graph at the left is a ranker of ATSL. Note that Pandora is dead last at one hour.
New-media supporters argue that broadcasting is dead. The future is narrowcasting, offering a different product to each listener. That’s what Pandora does.
If narrowcasting is the future, then TSL should be higher for Pandora than for broadcasters. It isn’t. It is actually lower than TSL for groups streaming their terrestrial signals. Many of the groups have three times the TSL as Pandora.
Pandora apologists will argue that the terrestrial groups have dozens and even hundreds of streams, while Pandora is a single station. But if that explains Pandora’s lower TSL it raises doubts about all the pundits’ predictions about the future of radio.
Maybe Pandora is radio’s past, and today’s broadcasters are radio’s present and future.
This is a age of choices and customization for users. Peronalization is not a step backward. The assumption in the above article is that Pandora, like the days past with program directors, has no feedback from the listener. Fortunately, this is not the case. Songs can be thumbed up/down and fed back to a users playlist with some intelligence further refining his playlist to his likes. Pandora music can be customized for the user with direct personal control over what is being heard. Not so with broadcast radio today. If a song come up that isnt liked there are only 2 choices turn it off or find another radio station.
Lets set aside that fact that Pandora is just one stream among many. For internet radio the ATSL is fairly low in any case which would be expected in a time of early adoption/growth phase. The past data rates and infra cost would not support high quality sound. This however is changing. In addition, Pandora is also largely unavailable in your car - one of the primary places where one would listen to music. As the car becomes connected we would likely see these numbers start to go up as users choose content more personalized to them.
However there is no need to pick one medium over the other. They each have their benefits and can coexist together for a long time. Its okay.
Posted by: TDub | November 16, 2009 at 10:31 PM