TRIPLE A IS PUBLIC RADIO’S FASTEST GROWING MAJOR FORMAT

The annual Triple A Noncommvention has played an important role

in the growth of the “music discovery” format.

The 2019 conference will be held May 14 – 17 in Philadelphia.

The number of estimated weekly listeners to Triple A music stations in PPM markets increased by around 200,000 people in Fall 2018 compared with Fall 2016. 

This is  an increase of 10.2% in two years.

Triple A now has the third largest number of weekly listeners, passing Jazz which dropped to fourth place.

This a remarkable achievement for Triple A, a format that has increased its importance to public radio as a whole in recent years.

An analysis of Nielsen Audio ratings for public radio stations in PPM markets shows that stations with fulltime Triple A formats gained a larger percentage of estimated weekly listeners than any other format. Spark News compared Fall 2018 Nielsen PPM data for 106 stations with data from Fall 2016.

In fact, Triple A is the only public radio format that has more estimated weekly listeners in Fall 2018 than Fall 2016. The other three major program formats – NPR News/Talk, Classical and Jazz – had fewer weekly listeners over the same period.

Today we have topline formation about all 106 stations.. On Tuesday we will focus on fulltime Triple A and Jazz stations. On Wednesday we will zoom in on full time Classical stations. On Thursday and Friday we will report on the fulltime NPR News/Talk stations.

We tabulated the number of weekly listeners for each format by adding the estimated weekly listeners for all PPM market stations airing the format. Note that these totals are only for metro areas and there are likely more listeners outside the metro areas.

On the left are two charts summarizing the PPM ratings data for all 106 stations. The total number estimated weekly listeners to all of the stations in Fall 2018 was 22,302,300, down 1.3% from Fall 2016.

The 54 fulltime NPR News/Talk stations, as a group, have the largest number of weekly listeners, 64% of weekly listeners to all 106 stations. Though the aggregate number of estimated weekly listeners fell by 1.8% in Fall 2018 compared with Fall 2016, a slight majority (52%) of the NPR News/Talk station had more weekly listeners in 2018 than they did in 2016.

The estimated number of weekly listeners to the 24 stations airing Classical music fulltime was down 5% in Fall 2018 compared to Fall 2016. Nine of the 24 stations (38%) had more weekly listeners in Fall 2018 than they had in Fall 2016.

Triple A is now the number three format as measured by estimated weekly listeners. The number of weekly listeners to 15 fulltime Triple A music stations was up by almost 200,000 people (10.2%) in Fall 2018 compared with Fall 2016.

The estimated weekly listeners to 13 fulltime Jazz stations decreased by around 225,000 (11.1%) when comparing Fall 2018 with Fall 2016. Four of the 13 Jazz stations had more weekly listeners in Fall 2018 than Fall 2016.

Thank you to everyone at Nielsen Audio and the Radio Research Consortium for making the data available.