Tom Leykis had a number of people call up to explain why they thought the ratings on talk radio are plummeting. There were a variety of opinions.
Tom’s opinion which he used to lead the audience response was that it is Rush Limbaugh’s fault. The calls however, didn’t give much insight. Having a young person call up and say “I would never listen to Rush Limbaugh” gives no insight into the question – they didn’t listen before and they aren’t listening now – so their opinion has nothing to do with why KFI lost 1/3 of its audience since February.
That being said, a number of the callers mentioned they listen to iHeartRadio a lot – while iHeartRadio is going to have 100% metrics of how many people are listening to it, it’s fairly unlikely that iHeartRadio users are going to be included in the PPM measurements – if they’re using earbugs, the process is they need to plug the PPM device into the the audio source, and then plug their earbuds, headphones, etc into the PPM device. How exactly does that work with bluetooth?
Keep in mind that the top line Arbitron numbers are share, not a listener estimate or hours those listeners spend listening – you have to pay money to get that information.
My internet radio uses an app from Tunin.om to stream. Other brands of internet radios use vtuner.com and reviva.com. Those three services cover almost all brands of internet radios…. you can also go to their sites with a browser and stream on a pc.
I expect they offer metrics to the radio stations and that they are not included in the Arbitron ratings – some stations stream different shows than they broadcast, primarily during sporting events.
Once you have a internet radio that looks like a legacy radio, you will not go back to your legacy radio with the reception problems and lower fidelity audio.