TSL Tutorial: Heavy Listeners

I was recently talking with a program director about the importance of reinforcing his core listeners on a regular basis as they listen through an hour. The discussion centered around stop-set placement, but what remained with me is that many programmers aren't aware of the very lopsided way in which our audience is configured. That is, how P1 and quintiles work.

We often hear about P1s. Those are people who listen to us more than any other station. "P1" comes from "preference 1." But when we compare P1s to cume, in music research, perceptual studies, or other studies, we often don't see nearly the difference in attitudes that one would expect. There are three reasons for that.

1. The true P1 choice is not very accurately remembered by people who don't work in the radio business.

2. P1 can be influenced by a number of factors, including a morning show, lifestyle, top-of-mind recall, etc. Some of these have little to do with the actual programming and certainly little to do with the music.

3. Some P1 listeners aren't very "P1," as they listen to a whole lot of other radio stations nearly as much. And some P1 listeners aren't really "listeners," as they don't listen to very much radio at all.

Quintiles Are What Matter

What we really care about are quintiles. Quintiles are simply the five equal divisions of your listeners. The lightest users of your station are your Q1 listeners. The heaviest users of your station are your Q5 listeners. As it turns out, Q5s are the key to your success.

Time spent listening (TSL) is a complicated thing. It seems as though it should be important. And it is. But maybe not exactly like you've been thinking. Because TSL is full of surprises. Let's think about it, using a typical example. Assume that your station has a weekly TSL of 36 quarter-hours (nine hours).

Q: Does that mean that the daily TSL is 1.28 (9 hours /7 days) hours?

A: No. For that to be true, your average listener -- all your listeners actually -- would need to listen to you seven days a week. The sad truth is that they listen to you no more than three days (and perhaps a bit more) each week. A station with 100,000 listeners a week will likely have somewhere around 52,000 listeners a day, if they are successful. So we've just seen one way to build up your TSL: Get your listeners to listen to you more days per week.

Q: But this does mean that a typical listener spends nine hours per week listening to me, right?

A: No. That value is a mathematical average. It has almost nothing to do with the real world. Here is why: A few of your listeners spend a lot of time with you, but most of your listeners spend very little time with you.

How few? To look at a distribution like this, it is helpful to break down your audience into five equal parts called quintiles. Remember the 100,000 persons we used as an example above? Each quintile is one-fifth of that, or 20,000 people.

Here is the amount of listening you receive from each quintile:

HEAVIEST
Q5: 78%
Q4: 14%
Q3: 4%
Q2: 3%
Q1: 1% LIGHTEST

So we have very close to the 80/20 rule working here -- 20% of your listeners give you almost 80% of your total TSL. So you can see that a "typical" listener, who would fall in the middle of the third quintile, or Q3, would give you 4% of your ratings. They are NOT giving you nine hours a week. They are giving you 3 hours 48 minutes a week. Not a day. A week. Just try to burn them out on your oldies. It won't be easy.

Q: But that isn't my station. Mine is different, right?

A: Other than for a couple of formats for which the top quintile is as low as 68%, this distribution is universal. It applies to all stations. Your station's TSL may vary, but not the fact that only a small part of your audience is your "real" listeners. That has, of course, some very important implications for our programming. We have only scratched the surface. We'll continue discussing TSL in future newsletters. In the meantime, if you have questions about TSL, please feel free to send them to me. We'll talk about your questions in future columns.

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