By Laurel Hyatt
“Long live jocks,” Pete Townshend would sing if he knew how important announcers still were to radio.
The latest BBM ratings imply that stations with strong on-air personalities are still on top, while those that step back and let the music speak for itself are finding themselves with less of a voice.
The top two stations for share of hours tuned (adults 12 and over) for survey 4 of 2005 in Toronto (read: the media centre of Canada) were… drumroll please… CHUM FM, with 9.1 (double digits are unheard of these days in Tranna) and CHFI FM not far behind with 9.0. For those of you old enough to remember when the Blue Jays played at Exhibition Stadium, you’ll have heard the names Roger, Rick, and Marilyn, and Erin Davis. They continue to lock up the morning drive period at CHUM and CHFI, the way the Jays clenched the World Series in 1992 and 1993. (The Jays’ analogy is apt, since they’re owned by Rogers, which owns CHFI.)
Among these two powerhouses is Standard’s CFRB, whose announcers seemingly date to when the Maple Leafs were still among the Original Six. Six is an appropriate number, since CFRB grabbed a 6.8 share, fourth after EZ Rock at 7.9. Still, there’s an undeniable comfort factor among listeners who tune in to the same people their parents did to find out snow day closures and traffic on the 401.
Taking the BBM book, we did some rudimentary regression analysis, and calculated some standard deviations and chi squares (or, more accurately, we took the numbers and put them on a dartboard), and arrived at the conclusion that intuition is often the best way to program a radio station. And CHUM and Rogers (and many others across Canada) seem to have hit on a successful formula: listeners like a friendly voice, a personable personality (is there a reason that Howard Stern got sent to subscription radio purgatory?), and people who have a genuineness and integrity that is often lacking in today’s information-assaulted world.
People looking for a jukebox are turning to iPods and Internet radio and CDs and Galaxie—they’re not fiddling with a dial on an old-fashioned receiver. So why are some stations spinning the tunes like they were on an unmanned space station?
Formats adopting the name of some fictitious person where the jocks take a back seat continue to droop. JACK FM in Toronto had a 2.3 share in Toronto, down from 2.7 the previous book. BOB FM in Winnipeg, which started the whole variety favourites genre, fell from a 7.6 to 7.1 share of 12+ from survey 3 of 2005. We hate to use “elevator” statistics (going up? going down?), but this seems to be one trend heading for the basement.
The same story is played out in other major markets. In Vancouver, the ratings leader is Corus’ CKNW, with a new/talk/sports format (which I hear is fairly reliant on announcers), garnering a 14.8 share among listeners aged 12 and over. Second was QM FM, with an 8.8 share, which features personalities all the time except for overnights and weekend evenings. Here, JACK did better, coming in third with 7.3% of hours tuned. It has jocks all day except overnights.
In La belle province, the top-rated station in Montreal was French-language Rythme FM, with a 10.1 share of listeners 12 and over. Not surprisingly, Rythme FM’s Web site sports the slogan, “The biggest musical variety and the biggest personalities,” as an image of two of its hosts flank Bono. Only in Quebec could radio personalities be bigger than U2, but there you go: the cult of personality is flexing its muscle. Next is CBF FM, the French-language CBC station, with an 8.8 share of 12+, which again makes heavy use of announcers.
We don’t need to march across the country to see the same patterns emerging. We sound like a broken record—sorry, CD or MP3—but radio continues to do well where it’s local and where it uses warm bums in seats to connect to listeners.
Still not convinced? Well, you’re reading this commentary, aren’t you, by a service that has people behind the words, instead of just press releases? ‘Nuff said.
Laurel Hyatt is cartt.ca’s radio editor, based in Ottawa. She does not own an MP3 player.
