RADIO 2005: CUME NOW 93.7%; AQH STABLE AT 14.5% Tony Sanders – BillBoard The percentage of the U.S. population that tunes into radio in the for at least five minutes during the week dipped slightly in the Spring 2005 survey, and now stands at 93.7%, down from 93.9% in Winter 2005. The figures are based on Arbitron’s survey of the continuously-measured radio markets, and covers persons 12+, Monday-Sunday, 6 a.m.-12 midnight.
That Spring 2005 audience figure translates to a raw body count of 145,846,300 persons tuning into radio over the course of the broadcast week; it’s a number that’s much lower than the total US population, but covers the audience measured in the nearly 100 markets surveyed four times a year by Arbitron.
For comparison, radio’s listener lowpoint over the last seven years was Summer 1999, was when the cume rating was 94.6%. Since the U.S. population has grown over the years, that 94.6% represented 133,337,100 people.
Radio’s average quarterly hour audience has held stable, on a percentage basis, at 14.5% of the U.S. population (12+) for the last several survey periods. In terms of 12+ population, that percent translates to 22,648,800 people, up from the Winter 2005 total of 22,544,200 but down slightly from Fall 2004’s AQH persons of 22,677,500.
The AQH lowpoint for radio, according to data available online from Arbitron, was Summer 2001, when listenership was 15.2%. That percentage represented 21,866,300 persons. |