Radio, Radio

Uh huh:

Terrestrial broadcasters insist they’re not nervous about satellite radio’s 7 million subscribers, but they’ve successfully stalled Arbitron’s plan to add satellite and online radio listening to its diary measurement system.

Arbitron was originally scheduled to instruct its diary keepers to record their satellite and online radio listening in the fall 2005 book. Instead, Arbitron now plans a 25-market test of the process in February and will delay full implementation until summer 2006, at the earliest.
Arbitron said the change is a response to the concerns of the National Association of Broadcasters’ Local Radio Audience Measurement Committee and the Arbitron Radio Advisory Council.

In 2003, I was tapped by Arbitron to keep a radio-listening diary for a week and aside from the occasional SU game radio broadcast, the only listening I recorded were a few Internet radio stations (I don't know if I was supposed to list them, but no one came and frog-marched me into the street for doing so).

Actively preventing companies from developing metrics for new media (or even new media derivatives of old media like new firms of "radio") seems like a really short-sighted, almost Sgt. Schultz-like approach ("I know nothink!"). I expect this will come back and bite broadcasters in the butt. (Arbitron has already developed a means of measuring podcast listenership--I'd love to see that data.)

It's funny; every few months (when I occasionally make the mistake of answering a call that reads "Unknown" on my caller ID) I get a call from some research company that wants to survey me about my radio listenership. I always tell them before beginning that I do not listen to terrestrial radio, preferring Internet radio. They thank me, and hang up. While I'm thankful for this, it also seems really short-sighted. Granted, these are just hired script-reading interviewers and not the constructors of the survey, but I think it would be immensely useful to those developing these surveys to ask questions about the extent to which--and why--certain respondents may not listen to terrestrial radio. Of course, this presumes that the survey commissioners have any real interest in finding out these things.