Below is an email sent out by a large online music site about college station WKRB:
“Rotation on Terrestrial and Online Station Reaching 1.5 Million”
It’s our opinion that emails like this are the reason that musicians get misled. After trying any and all such opportunities, and selling zero, the artist ends up thinking that the music must not be good. But is that the case?
The first thing to know about broadcasting is that more than 99% of the listeners are live (real-time, tuned in while it’s happening), and less than 1% of the listeners are “delayed” (listening later). KROQ in Los Angeles (largest alternative station in the world), for example, has about 30,000 people listening at this moment, but not enough “online listeners” to even show up in the ratings at all. And WLTW in New York is the largest station of any format, and has 100,000 people listening at this moment, but not enough “online listeners” to show up in the ratings either. And these stations are promoted by billboards, stadium concerts by Arctic Monkeys and Katy Perry, TV stations, Leno and Letterman, massive advertising, etc.
But somehow, college station WKRB in Brooklyn (New York) is supposed to have FIFTEEN times more listeners than WLTW, and THIRTY FIVE times more listeners than KROQ, even though WKRB has no billboards, no concerts, no TV stations, no ad budget at all (it’s non-commercial), and get this… only 10 watts:
http://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/finder?call=wkrb&x=-526&y=-283&sr=Y&s=C
Well, college radio is great for some things (like music opinions, and referrals to gigs), but reaching listeners is not one of them. Check the New York ratings, by Nielsen, here:
Use the drop-down box on this link:
https://tlr.arbitron.com/tlr/public/market.do?method=loadAllMarket
Select New York (where WKRB is) and click GO.
Notice how WKRB is not listed; this is because it has NO LISTENERS. The top station, WLTW, has only 100,000 listeners. There are NO online stations listed at all. Matter of fact, if you select any other city, you’ll see there are NO online stations, because none have enough listeners to even rank a 0.1 which is the bottom.
Matter of fact #2: If WKRB really did have 1.5 million listeners, it would be worth 15 times as much money as WLTW; well, WLTW is worth about $500,000,000 (five hundred million) dollars if you want to buy it.
Matter of fact #3: Every 10,000 listeners results in a music sale (album or single) for an indie, so one “spin” on WKRB would result in 150 sales, and ten spins would be 1500 sales. Yet somehow, spins on WKRB don’t result in any sales at all that we have heard of.
So, are artists being misled by online statistics such as this?
Contributed by Bryan Farrish. Thanks, Bryan!
Bryan Farrish Promotion is an independent promotion company handling airplay promotion and booking promotion 310-998-8305