The Media Audit: Hispanic Listening To Country Radio Is Increasing

A new analysis, based on all country radio listeners in the 84 Media Audit Markets surveyed between 2001 and 2006, will be released in detail at Albright & O’Malley’s Pre-CRS “Sunrise Seminar”, which also shows growth in internet usage, support of the Republican party and a decline in country listeners who are registered Democrats

A&O are presenting yet another reason to attend this year’s Country Radio Seminar and arrive very early on Wednesday, February 28, 2007.

This first look at new data on country listeners provides evidence that the CRS-Edison Research project on what country music needs to do to appeal to Hispanic radio listeners is very timely, given that TMA’s 18+ telephone sampling shows an increase of 34% in the number of Hispanics who report listening to country radio in the last three years. We will present a detailed look at country qualitative trends at our Pre-CRS 'sunrise" seminar.

A few other highlights of the TMA national country radio usage data:

* The largest percentage of the country audience in 2006 is 35-44 (24%).
* Almost 77% of country radio listeners are between 18 and 54.
* Both 25-34 and 45-54 usage has been very stable over the last three years.
* The number of country radio listeners online at least once per month has almost doubled from 47.1% in 2001 to 80.5% in the last year.
* The percentage of country listeners who are registered Republicans has been on the increase for the last three years while the percentage who are registered Democrats has been decreasing for five straight years.
* 67% of all country radio listeners say they voted in the past year.
* 82.8% of country listeners questioned by Media Audit in 2006 are not reached by any other format.

Also to be revealed at next Wednesday’s A&O client meeting are the results of “Roadmap 2007,” a perceptual study of 10,062 listeners across the U.S. and Canada who completed an online questionnaire on the type of country music they like best, reasons for listening to their favorite country station, degree of satisfaction with that station, voice tracking, streaming, HD Radio, marketing preferences, their attitudes toward participating in a diary, telephone or metered radio rating surveys,

These two A&O research presentations are just a part of a terrific slate of presentations, speakers and special events for their clients who are attending CRS. Now A&O is opening the meeting to the public by invitation only.