Country Radio Today - 2012

Arbitron's much-anticipated 2012 edition of the "Radio Today" annual format updates will be out the first week of December.

As usual since 2008, the stats will reflect annual format averages through the preceding years' fall book.  Up to 2007, the report used shares ending with the spring survey. 

It should come as no surprise that the country format is UP:

Combined country shares (both "country" and "new country" stations added together) have shown impressive consistency over the last decade:

ARB reports that country's weekly cume of the 1,857 measured stations in the last year is 66,025,700 with an average quarter hour persons of 3,479,000.

The average share trend is positive and consistent over the last ten years.

Sp02 (2003 Radio Today):  13.4
Sp03 (2004 Radio Today):  13.4
Sp04 (2005 Radio Today):  12.4
Sp05 (2006 Radio Today):  12.9
Sp06 (2007 Radio Today):  13.0
Sp 07 (2008 Radio Today):  13.1
Fa08 (2009 Radio Today):  12.9
Fa09 (2010 Radio Today):  13.4
Fa10 (2011 Radio Today):  13.1
Fa11 (2012 Radio Today):  14.1

Country's national share in the new report will be 7.4 in the PPM markets, up from a 6.4 and a 7.1 in the previous two years, 15.3 in diary markets (up from 14.1 and 14.5) and 26.2 in unrated (county-by-county reports) markets, which were not tracked prior to 2011 but are also up from a 25.6 last year.

The gender makeup of that 3.5 million average quarter hour persons:  47.4% men 12+ and 52.6% females 12+.

I'll have more details in the next two days on audience composition, daypart, shares by state, qualitative, ethnic and TSL.