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Neilson has stagnated along with Buggy Whip manufactures. Most of the posts here are in regards to Static TV which is dying. We still consume media and this created a vacuum. This is being rapidly filled by a competitor. -- Arbitron. Listen to MP3's.. they want to know. Listen to a radio at work? they want to know. Listen to the traffic report in your car on your commute? they want to know.

Now I carry a pager type device to listen to the encoded audio in broadcasts.. even if it is from a torrent, youtube, MP3, OTA, Cable..

http://www.arbitron.com/about/home.htm

And yes they pay you to carry the meter all day if you are in a test market. I expect them to continue to expand.

And so we put it in the same state as Washington. Now, I'm guessing this is a PR company and we have a perfect match of Arbirtron Ad agency listing Michael Sharp as Manager, Agency & Advertiser Services for several different regions of the US.

What does Washington Irving have to do with these whole proceedings, and why do you assume he is in Washington state?

It is difficult to believe that Asus did this out of love for Redmond. I wonder how much MS paid for this special treatment, or did they threaten Asus with higher prices?

I still don't see any conclusive evidence thi was Asus' work. I think your anger should be directed at Microsoft. I can't prove it for sure but the whois of this domain itsbetterwithwindows.com reads:

Registrant:
Michael Sharp
12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd.
Box 238
Kent, Washington 98030
United States

Domain Name: ITSBETTERWITHWINDOWS.COM
Created on: 05-Dec-08
Expires on: 05-Dec-09
Last Updated on: 05-Dec-08

And so we put it in the same state as Washington. Now, I'm guessing this is a PR company and we have a perfect match of Arbirtron Ad agency listing Michael Sharp as Manager, Agency & Advertiser Services for several different regions of the US.

Ok, from there if you google Arbitron Asus and Arbitron Microsoft you come up with two very juicy powerpoints from Microsoft on Arbitron's site.

I would put my guess at 95% that this is a Microsoft run and funded site with little to do with Asus other than get their permission.

Now you'll have to go based on average. Things are more expensive in NYC, Seattle, San Francisco, London, etc. than in smaller places like Dallas, Kansas City, Omaha, etc.

For what it's worth, it's actually Arbitron that calculates the estimated size of the listening audience. There are no -- so far as I know -- recording devices that track what people listen to on the radio.

The Portable People Meter is being rolled out now (top 50 markets by 2010, so they say) which will do something close to what you are talking about.

I saw a reply to you that said you missed the point, but I think he misunderstood yours. I don't think it's as big of a problem as you make it out to be though. Radio markets are gross approximations by nature. The station pays royalties based on its *market size*, not actual listenership (If I ran a station that could theoretically reach 500,000 people, but in actuality it only reaches 10, I still pay the 500k rate).

Yes, I used to work in radio. It's a racket.

For what it's worth, it's actually Arbitron that calculates the estimated size of the listening audience. There are no -- so far as I know -- recording devices that track what people listen to on the radio.

The Portable People Meter is being rolled out now (top 50 markets by 2010, so they say) which will do something close to what you are talking about.

I saw a reply to you that said you missed the point, but I think he misunderstood yours. I don't think it's as big of a problem as you make it out to be though. Radio markets are gross approximations by nature. The station pays royalties based on its *market size*, not actual listenership (If I ran a station that could theoretically reach 500,000 people, but in actuality it only reaches 10, I still pay the 500k rate).

Yes, I used to work in radio. It's a racket.

What happens if no audio code is present in the sample home?

Nielsen's patented Nielsen Media Monitor Sites (MMS) collect and store a constant stream of unique audio signatures for each broadcast, cable, and satellite signal received, covering all 210 TV markets. This includes all client PBS stations and client cable origination channels.

If any station's NAVE encoder is inadvertently interrupted, the A/P Meter installed in Nielsen sample homes uses the same patented technology to collect and store passive signatures for all non-encoded programming viewed. These signatures are downloaded each night to Nielsen's operations center. To identify viewing, the passive signatures collected from the A/P meter in the home are matched against the signatures collected by the MMS. This process occurs during the normal overnight data collection.

The passive signature-matching engine in the A/P Meter system is intended as a fail-safe back-up system, to be used when codes are not present in the signal.

From the announcement on woxy.com's home page:

Our goal is to keep this ship afloat until we can find a business model which allows us to go back to being free, but in the meantime, we need you to come on board.

Really it seems their hoping the rest of the world -- advertisers, primarily -- will catch up with what woxy.com is doing.

Basically, woxy.com's business model is: traditional (but independent) commercial radio but over the internet instead of over the air. You would think that advertisers who would be willing to buy commercials on traditional over-the-air radio would be able to easily make the transition to internet-only (especially if they realized that audience measurement online should be much better than the wacky Arbitron and other sampling-based metrics for over-the-air radio). Further, it seems that internet radio's audience has to be growing, while over-the-air's audience overall can't be growing -- sure people listen to over-the-air in their cars, but how many people with desk jobs listen to over-the-air radio at work instead of plugging their headphones into their computer? I just don't get it that adevertisers (inc. the agencies) that have dealt with radio for ages just don't seem to understand that commercial internet radio is basically the same thing.

Still, I would love to figure out exactly how it works.

What the device sends to an outside party depends on the technology.

Other solutions take a "fingerprint" of the audio and try to match that to a refence recorded elsewhere. Privacy should be protected.

Radio stations would have to play what people wanted to hear.

That's cute and all, and certainly plays well on slashdot, but it ends up sounding pretty stupid when you consider that the number of radio listeners has actually been growing for the past few years. Radio stations are obviously doing something right, and that something is "play[ing] what people want to hear."

I'm sure that you (like many here, including myself) don't listen to much mainstream radio, if any. You don't like what they play? Everyone has different tastes, nothing wrong with that. But don't make the mistake of thinking that because you think something sucks, everyone else feels the same way too.

They do have that information from regular broadcast outlets. Radio stations get rated by Arbitron. http://www.arbitron.com/ TV stations get rated by Nielsen. http://www.nielsenmedia.com/ I have worked in the radio and TV industries, and have participated in Arbitron ratings surveys after I had left the field. You should see the data that the stations get on their audiences! Nothing as to "Jane Smith listened to your station yesterday at 5:50 PM" but it does say "Your station had 5000 male listeners, aged 24-30, between 5 and 6 PM. 2000 male listeners, aged 18-24...."

Newspapers and magazines have distribution data for their subscribers as well. They may or may not have age/gender/income type of info, but they definitely have distribution info which can be compared to census data. "The higher income area of town has a 50% subscription rate of 50,000 copies daily, while the lower income area has 25% saturation at 10,000 copies daily."

That information (whether collected via outside surveys, inside subscription rates, or user registration) is vital to the advertising prices the company can charge. I would not be willing to spend as much for advertising on a radio station that has half the listeners as one that has twice as many in my target audience. It is simple bang-for-the-buck logic.

The reason why advertisers are willing to pay more for TV ads than Internet ads is simple. TV ads are pretty much captive audiences. Tivo and other PVR users excluded, most people will leave the volume up during commercials, hearing the jingle and brand name bombardment even while they go into the kitchen to get a beer. Web site ads either sit quietly in the background being ignored by the vast majority, or they get up front in your face upsetting you. Can you name, without looking, the ad on the top of the page now? How about the one on the previous page?

Another problem with Internet advertisement is the duplication of content. If you want to watch the latest Nerds game, you have to watch it on whatever local channel caries XYZ network. With online content, more than likely another source has it too. As an example, a friend sent me a link to an article on a local TV news station's web page. They require registration, so I went to the website for my local newspaper and grabbed basically the same article written by another reporter, without registration.

I hope this helps shed some light on the subject for you. One of the best forms of advertisement on the net is the viral marketing. Especially when the user has something to gain, besides the content, to give their information. To see an example, click the link in my sig.

*MY* Top-40 list? Well, for one thing, I am Canadian. And *my* Top-40 list is reads along the lines of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, CCR, Dire Straits, ZZ Top, etc. You might or might not get the picture by now.

To illustrate the folly of your argument that Canadian music is great, I submit to you the very thing you're arguing as proof of the abomination of radio stations "forcing" American music on us:

All righty, then.

Fact 1: Radio stations make money by selling advertising time.

Fact 2: Advertisers pay more money to run their ads when more people listen to a given radio station.

Fact 3: Increasing a radio station's listenership increases their profits.

Fact 4: To increase the listenership, the radio station has to play what people want to hear.

Summary of Facts 1-4: The radio station will make more money if it plays what people want to hear.

Therefore, if Canadian music is so great, listeners would want to hear it, and radio stations would play it on their own. No Canadian content laws would be required.

The fact that most radio stations play *exactly* their Canadian content requirements, many of them filling their 40% requirement during non-peak hours and playing their good stuff at drivetime (peak hours), should serve to illustrate the fact that Canadians don't especially care for Canadian music.

The one notable exception to this - the one national broadcaster who actually exceeds (massively or otherwise) the Canadian content requirements is the CBC. Nicknamed "The Corpse" in the broadcasting business, their ratings are tiny and their demographics are primarily shut-ins, 74-year-old women who would change the station but lost the owner's manual for the new-fangled radio they bought in the 1970s, and the 0.5% of 1% who actually think that Jean Poutine had been doing a good job as Prime Minister.

A recent Arbitron (radio station ratings) study in Toronto showed something very interesting.

First, prime time in radio is drive time. Morning and evening commutes. People listen to the radio in their cars.

Second, superheterodyne radio receivers (which is just about every radio receiver made since the 1930s) leaks an RF signal mathematically related to the station to which the radio is tuned.

Radio station ratings services like Arbitron use the above facts to calculate drivetime ratings for a given radio station very easily. Point some special equipment at a freeway, count the number of car radios leaking a local oscillator signal which would indicate the radio is tuned to that station, and compare that to the total number of cars going by tuned to other stations.

Arbitron found that, on one day in Toronto, close to 50% of radios were tuned to Buffalo NY radio stations. Granted, of course, Arbitron studies presuppose that your station's listeners will be employed (which is good, because you don't care to try to advertise to people who have no money) and who drive (again, good, because few reasonable people will take the bus to work if they don't have to).

Apparently, even in Canada's biggest market, Canadians aren't any more sophisticated than Americans.

Yes there is.

Cable prices went up and I (along with many others) don't have any choice in selecting a cable provider.

Companies like Clear Channel now own 1,200+ radio stations rather than the previous limit of 40.

Clear Channel stopped playing Dixie Chicks for making a political statement that management did not agree with.

Stop being a liberal or a conservative: be rational and exercise common sense.

While i'm not exactly sure how they figure it out, i did once get a phone call that asked which stations i listened to, and if i liked certain clips from songs.

The company you are looking for is called Arbitron. Most of the ratings information is compiled during 'books' which are roughly equivalent to 'sweeps' for television. Most of the information is compiled from written diaries where a listener is expected to write down each 15 minutes of radio they listen to. Last I heard (couple of years ago) they were working with a technology called 'People Meters' (IIRC), which would automate the process a bit more.

BTW, I learned this while working the databases of a company that attempted to exploit Arbitron's selection criteria (we roughly reverse engineered it) and marketing directly to the people most likely to have a diary. Ya know, as a simple reminder of what to write in the diaries.

It was a fairly successful business, right up until Clear Channel bought most of our clients and used their own marketing company to do what we did, leading to about a 30% reduction in staff at my employer. Two years after I was laid off the company I worked for crumbled and was sold.

Your handle has proved prescient - what do you think arbitron is?

Articles about the state of radio really irk me. "Why?" you ask? Because I've been working in radio as an IT manager for more than three years now, and what really strikes me as the problem with radio today is that all that market research is right. When Arbitron (the radio ratings folks) says that people in your market really, really want to hear Kenny G. and the backdoor boys (yuck!), then they're probably right!

Basically what I'm saying is that the problem with radio in the US is not the handful of corporations that have decided which formats to sell - it's the undereducated media consumers who tell those corporations (with their dollars) that they'd rather hear the same song four times a day for three months than be exposed to something new every week.

How is the station I work at different? Well, firstly we're a community radio station. Don't know what that is? Doesn't surprise me. We air programming that is produced by members of our broadcast area. We air more than 80 unique programs covering more than 20 distinct genres of music each week. We've had weeks where we play more than 1000 DIFFERENT songs. A thousand! Shameless plug: KDHX St. Louis

Bottom line - Don't complain about lack of choices - there's a 90% chance that there's a community/college/public station near you with programming that you like, and that you can have an impact upon - screw the seek button and GO FIND IT.

Check out the Portable People Meter from Arbitron. It can recognize subaudible watermarks in music including over radio, Musak, and even some streaming audio compressions. Arbitron uses it for ratings purposes.

Of course, then there is IBOC from Ibiquity which is an on-channel digital enhacement for AM and FM signals, part of which could be used for datacasting, as part of most DTV signals will.

Shoutcast and a fractional t1 will get you 50 simultaneuous listeners.

Check out Arbitron and you can see that you're not going to go far with a fractional T1.

I don't know what posseses these people to be so obnoxious.

This.

You can't fill out the form properly so the station can charge the advertisers for your eardrums unless you know what stations you're listening to.

As to the Big-Brother aspects of the thing, Arbitron says this to broadcasters:

• Measuring Compliance
  Compliance began with undocking the meters each day. We instructed panelists to undock their meters first thing in the morning and dock them in the recharging unit at bedtime. During November, the median undocking time on weekdays was 7:39AM, and the median docking time was just after 11PM. As expected, the undocking time was later on the weekend, around 9:00AM, as people tended to sleep later. The docking time was also later, 11:25PM, as people stayed up later (Figure 2). The PPM detects encoded media even while it is in the recharging unit, which means it picks up the clock radio in the morning and late-night TV viewing by people in bed.

The system covers TV as well as radio. Arbitron is partnering with Neilsen on this. The details are:

• Encoding Status
  (As of July 18, 2001, in the Wilmington, Delaware test area)

  Of the 71 media outlets invited to participate, 63 are now encoding their audio full time.

  • All 38 radio stations.
  • All 8 local TV stations
  • 17 of 25 cable networks.

The Arbitron Portable People Meter listens to audio, has a DSP, "extensive storage", and an uplink system via its docking station. So it could potentially be used as a bugging device if reprogrammed. One more small step towards the surveillance society.

At least the current model doesn't have a GPS.

As to the Big-Brother aspects of the thing, Arbitron says this to broadcasters:

• Measuring Compliance
  Compliance began with undocking the meters each day. We instructed panelists to undock their meters first thing in the morning and dock them in the recharging unit at bedtime. During November, the median undocking time on weekdays was 7:39AM, and the median docking time was just after 11PM. As expected, the undocking time was later on the weekend, around 9:00AM, as people tended to sleep later. The docking time was also later, 11:25PM, as people stayed up later (Figure 2). The PPM detects encoded media even while it is in the recharging unit, which means it picks up the clock radio in the morning and late-night TV viewing by people in bed.

The system covers TV as well as radio. Arbitron is partnering with Neilsen on this. The details are:

• Encoding Status
  (As of July 18, 2001, in the Wilmington, Delaware test area)

  Of the 71 media outlets invited to participate, 63 are now encoding their audio full time.

  • All 38 radio stations.
  • All 8 local TV stations
  • 17 of 25 cable networks.

The Arbitron Portable People Meter listens to audio, has a DSP, "extensive storage", and an uplink system via its docking station. So it could potentially be used as a bugging device if reprogrammed. One more small step towards the surveillance society.

At least the current model doesn't have a GPS.

As to the Big-Brother aspects of the thing, Arbitron says this to broadcasters:

• Measuring Compliance
  Compliance began with undocking the meters each day. We instructed panelists to undock their meters first thing in the morning and dock them in the recharging unit at bedtime. During November, the median undocking time on weekdays was 7:39AM, and the median docking time was just after 11PM. As expected, the undocking time was later on the weekend, around 9:00AM, as people tended to sleep later. The docking time was also later, 11:25PM, as people stayed up later (Figure 2). The PPM detects encoded media even while it is in the recharging unit, which means it picks up the clock radio in the morning and late-night TV viewing by people in bed.

The system covers TV as well as radio. Arbitron is partnering with Neilsen on this. The details are:

• Encoding Status
  (As of July 18, 2001, in the Wilmington, Delaware test area)

  Of the 71 media outlets invited to participate, 63 are now encoding their audio full time.

  • All 38 radio stations.
  • All 8 local TV stations
  • 17 of 25 cable networks.

The Arbitron Portable People Meter listens to audio, has a DSP, "extensive storage", and an uplink system via its docking station. So it could potentially be used as a bugging device if reprogrammed. One more small step towards the surveillance society.

At least the current model doesn't have a GPS.

I would bet people with HD TV's recieving HD programing would spend more time watching TV than average, watch longer, and prefer HD programs to standard programs.

Arbitron's Personal People Meter technology allows this kind of data to be collected. It is a "pager-sized device that is carried by consumers. It automatically detects inaudible codes that TV and radio broadcasters as well as cable networks embed in the audio portion of their programming using encoders provided by Arbitron."

They've got all sorts of methods, but the most widely used are diaries that are given to people to document all of their listening; i.e. what stations at what time of day for how long, etc. You can learn a whole lot about radio research and ratings at the Arbitron web site, as they are the primary media research company used; in fact, its their research that "the ratings" are really based on, as its their books that are used as the standard ratings measuring tool by radio (I think they do TV as well, but I don't know TV so I don't want to definitively say so, although Nielson is the standard there so its somewhat moot :)). You want to talk about a company that wields incredible power in the industry? Look at Arbitron. Of course, they are extremely diligent and have never reflected any sort of bias whatsoever, which is why they are held in such high regard, because ANY indicator that they were even the slightest bit biased would destroy their credibility. Multibillion dollar corporations like CBS and Clear Channel don't take kindly to that sort of thing, as you might imagine. :)

Aside from the Arbitron books, the less official means of finding out listening habits include mail ,phone and in-person surveys, which I'd be willing to bet that many Slashdotters have gotten in the past, either as a quick phone call with a few innocuous questions, postcard or quick stop in the mall by a guy with a clipboard. These are used to supplement the research done, but the listener diaries are to radio what the Nielson set-top boxes are to TV. Hope that clears it up somewhat. While I learned a lot about this stuff, I'm no expert (else I wouldn't be answering this stupid phone collecting my paltry sum to tell people how to find the space bar:)) so you really should check out the Arbitron site for more info.

Deo