Ratings as baloney -- food for thought.

Radio ratings are a fraud. I commit this heresy with joy and relief (I highlight “heresy” because ratings are part of radio’s religious dogma)—like everybody in the radio business who ever thought it, I suppressed it for decades. By the way, “music research” is bullshit, too.

Blame ad agencies—they must have a rational basis for timebuying—the clients demand rationality from ad people, even though the client top dog decides with his gut. Blame payola—the original ‘50s scandal sent radio managers scrambling for an incorruptible music programming system. Understandable. But then, because in business accounting trumps intuition, “research” overwhelmed human judgment.

The result: radio went deaf—wouldn’t listen to listeners—and tone-deaf—wouldn’t listen to music. For over thirty years they’ve been managing an entertainment resource—a product whose content is emotion—with adding machines. Wouldn’t listen to their own experience, knowledge, and guts. (More on radio and music in Bill Flanagan’s CBS Sunday Morning piece.)

I believe radio ratings are broadly accurate. But, take the typical Arbitron sample and winnow it down to demographics, and you’re slicing baloney way too thin.

For more than thirty years, radio people have accepted that a human being in the age of media portability and proliferation would keep a diary of his radio listening accurately and completely—accurately enough to use the resulting averages as hard numbers—calculating costs-per-thousand listeners, even.

For the next who-knows-how-long, the ratings vendors wish us all to believe a human in the digital era will wear a listening device, twenty-four hours a day, and that data gathered this way will be more accurate than before. Isn’t it about time we applied some sort of sniff test to this logic? Isn’t it time, when radio needs fresh ideas, to at least rescind ratings’ sacred cow status?

Every computer on a network reports a startling array of data about its user. If you haven’t blocked your browser, I know what city you're in, what operating system you’re using, how many pages you clicked on, when, and how long you spent on this site. Every cellphone does the same stuff. The new digital radios could also be connected. Then radio would know exactly who’s listening to what, and wouldn’t be tempted to let random samples overwhelm judgment. Now that would rate being called High Definition.